


Ki-Blind

by Sholio



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Action/Adventure, Epic, Gen, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-10-09
Updated: 2002-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-17 13:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 102,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone's mysteriously lost their ability to control ki, and the Earth is being invaded. Will strategy succeed when brute strength fails?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Little Ki Lost

It was spring in the vast wilderness of mountains and forests, grassland and wasteland, that lay beyond the Sons' house. The sun was warm, the trees were just beginning to unfurl their leaves, and early flowers carpeted the hillsides -- but winter had not yet released its lock on the land, as evidenced by the snow capping the mountaintops, and the chunks of ice still floating in the wild-country rivers.

"KYAAAAAH!"

From the depths of a brilliant blue sky, the figure of Son Goku appeared, tiny at first but rapidly growing in size as he plunged down, down, towards the green Earth far below, and his opponent ...

... an opponent who easily sidestepped Goku's dive, but his smirk changed to a look of annoyance when Goku changed direction, too, and the two Saiyajin collided with a ripple of energy that knocked the budding leaves off the nearby trees.

"What are you trying to do, Kakarrot? Let me see you coming a mile away?"

"I still hit you, didn't I?"

The two Saiyajin sparred back and forth in the brisk spring wind, high above one of the wilderness's numerous small, fast mountain rivers, its gray waters splashing high into the air as if to claw at the combatants. It was a light match; they were both powered up to Super Saiyajin, but not to a higher level, and they hadn't knocked each other through any mountaintops or flattened square miles of the surrounding forest.

Then without warning, the light flaring around the two of them suddenly died. Their hair flickered from blond to black, and the startled Saiyajin plummeted into the river below.

"GAAAHHH!" Goku shrieked, surfacing in a thrashing of arms and legs. "It's c-c-c-cold!"

"Shut up and save your energy for swimming, idiot," Vegeta retorted.

They clambered out onto the bank, drenched and shivering.

"What happened?" Goku asked.

"How should I know?" Vegeta automatically powered up a bit to warm himself up and to dry off the water soaking his light training clothes.

Nothing happened.

Goku had tried the same thing, with no more success. Their eyes met in mutual consternation.

"I can't control my ki," Goku said.

"Shut up, Kakarrot, and let me concentrate." Vegeta closed his eyes and sank into a meditative state. He could still sense the wellspring of life energy that lay within him, but when he tried to reach for it, he couldn't seem to grasp it; his thoughts splintered and skittered away. It was the same feeling as when he was very tired, or sick, and couldn't get control. Frustrated, he tried again and again, until he was gasping and sweating from the effort. The prince had determination in great abundance but it seemed that mere determination wasn't going to do the trick this time.

"Hey, Vegeta." Goku laid a hand on his shoulder; Vegeta flinched away and glared at him, but the younger Saiyajin continued, undaunted. "You're feeling the same thing I am, aren't you? Like we've been blocked from using our ki somehow?"

Vegeta clenched his fists. "Shit! I know I can break through ... if I just focus ..."

"I've tried and tried, but it's not working," Goku said. "Don't wear yourself out trying until we get a better strategy."

Vegeta would never admit it, but he knew Kakarrot was right. He drew a few deep breaths, calming himself.

"I have a strategy," he said. "First we get our control back and then we find the fuckers who did this and kill them."

Goku laughed, causing Vegeta to glare at him again. "Yeah, that's a good plan, but first we oughta get home, huh? Our wives are going to get mad at us if we stay out here all night."

Vegeta's eyes narrowed. "And just exactly how are we going to do that if we can't fly?"

"Teleport, silly." Goku laid a hand on his arm and touched two fingers to his forehead.

Vegeta closed his eyes and then opened them again with a slight shiver as the breeze, growing colder as the day faded towards evening, plastered his wet clothes against his body. They were still surrounded by forest and mountains.

"Kakarrot, you idiot, you need ki to teleport."

"Damn it, you're right. I forgot about that." Goku laughed. Vegeta wondered if there could possibly be a more annoying person to be stuck in the wilderness with.

"Kakarrot ... about how far from your home would you say we are now, huh?"

Goku thought briefly. "About ... forty miles or so, I guess."

Vegeta rapidly converted that figure that into the measuring units of his homeworld. He tried to estimate how long it would take to walk it, and realized that it had been so long since he'd traveled anywhere except by flying or in some kind of vehicle that he had no realistic idea of how long it took to walk anywhere. Damned if he was going to ask Kakarrot, though.

"So we walk," he said.

"I guess we do," Goku said, and added, "Hey Vegeta, can you sense anybody else's ki?"

Struck by sudden fear, Vegeta concentrated, sending out his sense questing for those most familiar to him -- Bulma and Trunks. It was something he did dozens of times a day, ever since nearly losing them to Buu, in the same manner that a more physical person might reach out and touch a loved one to feel the warmth of their skin and the reassurance that they were still alive.

He couldn't feel them.

For an instant he nearly lost himself in panic. Then he realized that he couldn't feel anything. He could sense Goku, dimly, but Goku was standing right next to him and he could barely feel him. Normally he could have picked out Goku's brilliant ki a world away. Of the forest's many small animals, he could very faintly sense the nearest of them, and beyond that, only the most frustrating hints. It was like trying to see through a layer of thick wool.

"We can't sense ki any more than we can use it," he snarled.

"I can feel you a little bit," Goku offered.

"Of course you can feel me, Kakarrot, you're standing right beside me. You'd probably lose the sense of me if I went across this meadow we're standing in. That's how weak it is."

"It's stronger than that," Goku said thoughtfully. "I can feel a little ways out from us ... a half-mile or so, I suppose. But not very well."

That's right ... sensing ki was something Goku was better at, too. Vegeta did not need that little blow to his ego right now. He spun away, muttering, and strode off in the direction that he assumed (based on the angle of the sun) would take them back to Kakarrot's home.

"Hey ... hey, Vegeta, wait up!"

"What are you going to do, Kakarrot -- stand there until whatever cut off our ki attacks the Earth?" Vegeta snapped over his shoulder.

With his longer legs, Goku caught up easily. "We don't know it's anything dangerous."

"Okay Kakarrot, let's look at the evidence. We've both been put out of commission by some sort of mysterious, unexplainable phenomenon. When, in your experience, does that ever mean anything but a direct threat to the Earth? When have strange things ever happened to us that weren't dangerous?"

"Well ..." Goku paused to think, then noticed that Vegeta was outdistancing him and hurried to catch up. "I can't think of anything, really."

"Face it Kakarrot, we're trouble magnets. Every dangerous thing within 200 parsecs goes out of its way to come by the Earth and try to destroy it."

Goku laughed. "Oh come on, Vegeta; not everything that comes to Earth is hostile. We've met friendly aliens and creatures too. Like Eighteen, or the Nameks ... or you."

"Oh, good examples, Kakarrot. There's Eighteen, who wiped out most of the population of this planet in Trunks's future timeline ... and the Nameks, such as Piccolo for example, the would-be ruler of the Earth ... oh yes, and _me_. Make a note to have Chi-Chi enroll you in a debating course, Kakarrot, because it's painful listening to you try to construct an argument."

The pine trees closed over their heads. The air was already getting uncomfortably chilly as the sun sank behind the mountains, and in the dimness under the trees, there were still occasional patches of snow. The two Saiyajin were jogging now and the exercise kept them warm enough, but Vegeta was aware that they were both still soaked to the skin, and it would probably be below freezing at night in the higher elevations.

"Maybe we should find a cave and dry out before we go much farther," Goku said, seeming to read the prince's mind -- another of his irritating characteristics.

"Getting home is a higher priority right now."

"Not if we get hypotherm--"

Goku broke off, and stopped running too. He tilted his head back and stared up at the sky.

Vegeta realized that Goku was no longer beside him. He paused and looked back, opened his mouth to speak, then shut it and looked up, following Goku's gaze.

The sun had vanished behind the mountains and the sky was tinged with the red and purple of early evening. High-altitude clouds still blazed golden in the sun's last rays. And among the clouds were thin red and gold streaks, contrails like jetstreams set on fire by the sun.

"What the hell ...?" Vegeta murmured.

"It looks like a meteor shower or something," Goku said.

"I knew it," Vegeta mumbled under his breath. "I knew it. This damned planet is in damned trouble again ... shit ... I told you, Kakarrot ..."

He trailed off into silence and the two Saiyajin watched the contrails creep across the sky.

"Ships?" Goku said.

Vegeta squinted at the sky. He might not have his ki abilities, but he still had his sharp Saiyajin senses, and just as importantly, the memories of hundreds of military missions on alien worlds. "They're too disorganized," he said. "More like a meteor shower, like you said at first -- _shit!"_

A blazing streak shot over their heads, close enough that they could feel the heat from it. The meteor, or whatever it was, blasted through the rock of a mountaintop behind them, sending up a great cloud of steam from vaporized snow, and crashed into the valley beyond.

Other meteors were falling around them, but none landed so close. Vegeta estimated that there were hundreds or thousands of the things, but they were landing so widely scattered that none were within more than a few miles of each other. All the way out to the darkening horizon, the streaks of fire continued to fall for a few minutes more, and then the strange rain had ended, its passage marked only by lingering trails of smoke in the sky, and occasional wisps rising from spots where the heat of the meteors had set isolated bits of the forest ablaze.

"What ... was ... that?" Goku said at last.

"Nothing good," Vegeta retorted. "Let's go take a look."

Just in the few minutes they had been standing still, the air had grown much colder and both were shivering as they started jogging again in the direction that the nearest meteor had fallen.

"Those can't be rocks. Rocks that small would have broken up in the upper atmosphere," Vegeta mused aloud as they ran. "There shouldn't be anything large enough left to hit the ground. Maybe those are chunks of a big rock that did break up ... but we would have seen a flash or heard the noise."

"Maybe it happened while we were sparring," Goku offered.

Vegeta leaped over a fallen log without breaking stride. Goku matched him step for step. "No. We would have noticed something, I'm sure. The flare of energy if nothing else."

They crested a rise and paused, looking down into a great bowl-shaped valley beneath them. Once, long ago, glaciers had come through this part of the world and taken huge bites out of the underlying rock. Now the forest softened the sharp edges, but the scars could still be seen in the mountainsides, like the bones of an emaciated beast covered in fuzzy green fur.

Fire flickered in the valley, but weakly, and it was dying out. The spring vegetation was simply too wet to burn, and only a few trees were blackened.

The two Saiyajin started down into the valley, casting occasional glances upward. No signs of the rain of meteors remained. The entire western sky was now ablaze with sunset's crimson fire, and in the east, a few stars had begun to emerge.

"Gonna be dark soon," Goku remarked, shoving his way through waist-high brush.

"Thanks for pointing out the obvious, Kakarrot."

The forest closed over their heads again. Down away from the lip of the valley, they could no longer see the smoke and had to use their sense of smell to close in on it. Vegeta kept his ki-sense extended to its utmost, but he could hardly even feel Goku, let alone anything else.

Suddenly Goku tensed and Vegeta heard a soft rustling in the undergrowth ahead of them. "Animal?" he said softly.

Goku shrugged, then slowly shook his head. "Have you noticed how quiet it's been since the meteor shower? They're all hiding."

Vegeta had noticed nothing of the sort. Not being very much in tune with the rhythms of his adopted world, he would have assumed that the silence in the forest was the normal hush of evening. But now that Kakarrot mentioned it, there was something a little ominous in this silence. It was too thick. Too complete.

The rustling came again. It sounded like something scuttling through the bushes, not very large ... maybe the size of a big cat or a dog.

The two Saiyajin tensed into battle stances as the noise approached them.

Vegeta squinted at the brush. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or ...?

"Hey, Vegeta," Goku whispered. "Is the fire spreading, do you think?"

So Kakarrot saw it too ... a dim red glow from the dark undergrowth.

"The smell of smoke is no stronger than before," Vegeta whispered back.

"... crap."

They tensed and prepared to meet whatever was about to come out of the brush.


	2. Invasion

"Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"

Goten sat up in the Briefs' driveway, rubbing his head. "Hey Trunks, ya' big bully, you hit me too hard. I lost my Super Saiyajin."

Trunks sat up a few feet away and touched his lavender hair. "It wasn't me, stupid. Look, I lost mine too."

"It wasn't me!" Goten protested.

The two boys stared at each other in confusion, then both tried to power up. Nothing happened.

"That's weird," Trunks said.

"Super weird," Goten agreed.

"Maybe your brother knows what's goin' on. Where is he?"

Goten made a face. "He's off somewhere with his --ick! -- girlfriend."

"Oh." Trunks stood up, brushing himself off, and jumped into the air -- only to fall flat on his bottom. "Hey, what? I can't fly. Goten, you try it."

Goten tried. "I can't either, Trunks." His bottom lip stuck out and he stared at his older friend, waiting for Trunks to explain what was going on and tell him what to do, as usual.

Instead, Trunks threw back his head and hollered, "Moooooommmm!"

After a moment, Bulma's blue head appeared at one of the windows of the Capsule Corp. building. "What's the matter now? You can't be hungry again. You just ate."

"I'm hungry," Goten said hopefully. Trunks ignored him.

"Hey Mom, where's Dad?"

"I don't know. He never tells me. Probably off with Son-kun or something." Bulma frowned. "Why? Did you break something?"

"Nuh-uh!" The boys shook their heads in unison. Then Trunks said, "Somethin' weird is going on and I wanted to ask Dad about it."

Bulma folded her arms on the windowsill and looked down at the boys. "You can ask me about it."

"You wouldn't know," Trunks said, then quickly covered his mouth with his hands.

Bulma's eyes narrowed. "Oh, I wouldn't know, huh? Don't you remember your pretty young mother is a super-genius? What would that thick-headed Saiyajin wannabe prince know that I wouldn't know? Go ahead, ask me."

Trunks took his hand away from his mouth nervously. "Well ... me and Goten, we can't fly."

"Or go Super Saiyajin," Goten put in.

"You can't? Good! You won't be getting into any trouble then."

"But Mom, it happened all of a sudden. We were just ... uh, playing ..." -- for some reason that neither boy could figure out, Bulma and Chi-Chi hated the word "fighting", even though their dads did it all the time and never got in trouble for it -- "and all of a sudden we fell down and couldn't fly any more."

"Hmmm. That does sound a bit odd. You're not running a fever, are you? Does your throat hurt?"

Trunks rolled his eyes. "Mom, I'm fine. Really. 'Sides, you don't get sick all at once anyhow."

Bulma sighed. "Well, I'll call Chi-Chi and see if either Vegeta or Son-kun is around. Maybe it's some weird Saiyajin puberty thing or something. You had better not be going through puberty yet, that's all I have to say about --" She broke off, her mouth hanging open.

"Mom? What's wrong?"

The boys twisted around, looking where she was looking, and both froze, staring.

The sky overhead was filled with brilliant streaks from horizon to horizon. As they stared in disbelief, the streaks began to fall to the ground, and delicate traceries of fire turned into searing balls of flame.

"Omigosh! Trunks! Goten! Get inside! Now!" Bulma screamed, halfway to climbing out the window in her desperation to reach the children. Balls of fire were landing in the city all around them. Screams and wailing sirens reached their ears. With a deafening boom, one of the meteors plowed into the yard no more than fifty feet from the two boys, knocking them off their feet and flinging Bulma away from her window. Shrieking in terror, Trunks and Goten tried at first to fly, then remembered that they couldn't and making a wild dash for the door.

Bulma met them just inside and gathered them into her arms. The boys clung to her, shaking almost as badly as she was.

"What's going on?" Dr. Briefs charged into the foyer from the direction of his lab. His wife appeared from the kitchen, her poufy hair covered with flour.

"Well, I say," she said calmly, trying to brush the flour out of her hair. "I was just stirring up a batch of cookies -- ginger snaps, too, and you know that's your father's favorite --"

"Not now, Mom!" Bulma shoved the children in the direction of her mother and went to the door, peering outside. Trunks and Goten immediately joined her, fear giving way to their customary cockiness now that the immediate danger was past.

The shower of meteors was over, but from the plumes of smoke rising over the city, a good deal of damage had been done. Miraculously none of the meteors had hit the Capsule Corp. buildings. Wisps of smoke rose from the small crater in the yard.

"Wow," Trunks murmured, approaching it with Goten right behind him.

"Get back inside!" Bulma yelled at them. "Dad! Do you have a machine gun or something handy?" Her father gave her a helpless look. "Oh, for crying out ..." She grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a coatrack, and followed the boys outside.

The boys were crouched at the lip of the crater, peering down inside. "Oooooohhhh ...."

"Get away from there!" Bulma shouted at them. She leaned over the boys' heads, ready to snatch them back if anything came bursting towards them. Nothing happened, though. Looking down into the crater, Bulma saw a metal sphere about the size of her head, half-buried in dirt from its forcible landing and still glowing faintly from the heat of re-entry.

"What's that?" Bulma said aloud, forgetting her fear in curiosity.

"Yeah, what's that, Mom?" Trunks asked, looking up at her.

"I have no idea! It could be dangerous for all we know. Go back inside with your grandparents."

Both boys assumed their obstinate look. "We're not babies, Mom," Trunks said. "We fought Buu, remember? If that thing tries to attack, we'll just go Super Saiyajin and fuse and kick its a-- kick its butt."

"Don't say 'butt', did your father teach you to talk that way? And you can't go Super Saiyajin right now, remember?" She glanced down at the metal object. "I wonder if that could be related somehow ..."

"Oh, shoot, that's right," Trunks said, downcast, then brightened. "It can't be that tough! We can still beat it."

"Yeah!" Goten cheered, waving his fists in the air.

"EEEEEEK!" Before the shriek was out of her mouth, Bulma was shoving the boys back towards the door of Capsule Corp., where her parents were watching anxiously. "It moved! It moved! I told you it was dangerous!"

"Huh? I wanna see!" Both boys craned their necks backwards just in time to see the metal sphere erupt upwards in a shower of dirt. It landed with a soft thunk on the far side of the crater, where it remained still for a moment and then began to tremble.

"Cooool ..." the boys chorused. "What else d'you think it's going to do, Mom?" Trunks asked.

"I don't know! It could explode! It could erupt into brain-sucking aliens!" Bulma backed towards the door with a deathgrip on each boy's shoulder.

"Cooool ..." they chorused again, and Goten added with a slight whine in his voice, "Mrs. Bulma, you're hurting me ..."

The metal sphere shuddered, made some clicking noises, and then parts of it began to fold outward. It rose on spindly metal legs and stood, swaying slightly. The legs were somewhere between four and five feet long, curved and jointed like those of a spider though it only had four of them, and the round metal sphere dangled at their apex just like a spider's body. One end of it opened up to reveal an aperture that glowed dull red.

"EEEEEEK! It's a sp -- a sp -- a spider! A really big spider! I HATE spiders! _Mom! Dad! Get me the biggest dictionary in the house RIGHT NOW!"_

"I don't think you can squash that, Mom," Trunks said, and pushed up his sleeves. "But I betcha Goten and I can!"

"No! Absolutely not! If either of you goes near that thing I'll ground you for the rest of your life!"

The spider-like thing swiveled slowly back and forth, swinging its red light, like an eye, over the staring humans and demi-Saiyajin children. It slowly fixated on Bulma and the boys. "Life forms detected," it said in a flat metallic voice. Bulma jumped a foot in the air. "Life forms detected. Species: human. Danger level: minimal. Action: exterminate."

 _"Did you hear that? Are you still going to tell me that thing's not dangerous?"_ Bulma's voice cracked in terror and she dragged the boys backward towards the door.

The metal spider sprang suddenly into the air. Bulma saw that its metal legs were tipped with wicked serrated claws. With a final shriek, she threw the boys through the door and slammed it behind them all. A split second later, there was a tremendous clang as the spider hit the door and the indentations of all four of its legs appeared in the metal.

"Uh-oh," Bulma said, backing away. There was a scritching sound at the door and then an ominous silence.

"Come on, Mom!" Trunks begged. "Let us fight it!"

"No! If you can't go Super Saiyajin, you're just a couple of kids." Bulma turned and made a dash for the phone. "I'm calling Chi-Chi! Vegeta had better be over at her house, and he'd better get back over here on the double if he knows what's good for him!"

 

* * *

 

"It looks like a spider," Goku said.

The two Saiyajin stared nervously at the creature in front of them. With its long legs, it stood just a little past their waists. It looked fragile enough to crumple with one blow. The red light at the front of the thing swept back and forth across them. The forest was growing darker and the red light shed an eerie glow over the surrounding foliage, making everything look like dried blood.

"It could have hidden weapons, Kakarrot," Vegeta warned. "Lasers or ... anything. Don't take your eyes off it."

"Life forms detected," the thing spoke suddenly. "Species: Saiyajin. Species extinct? Processing ... Determined: Species highly dangerous. Proceed at Power Level 2. Action: exterminate."

With that, it launched itself towards them in a blur of speed. Goku and Vegeta sprang away in opposite directions, easily eluding it. They might lack ki, but their Saiyajin reflexes were far faster than a human's.

"Damn it, one ki blast would take that thing out!" Goku complained. The red eye oriented to track on him.

"Life form faster than anticipated. Proceed at Power Level 3."

"Kakarrot, look out!"

This time the spider moved almost too fast for Saiyajin senses to detect. It was a red and silver blur in the dusk. Goku dodged, but he felt the wind of its passing. The red light vanished, and the darkening forest went still.

After a moment Goku said, "Vegeta --"

"Shh!" Vegeta cast about, straining all his senses. Even if he had still been able to sense ki, he wouldn't have been capable of feeling its presence, for the machine had no ki. Now, with its red light doused, it might as well have sunk into the ground for all he could detect it. He spun about at a tiny rustling sound, but it was only the wind in the trees.

"Vegeta, maybe it left," Goku whispered.

"No. It's still here, hunting us. We are hunters too, Kakarrot. Don't you feel it, watching you?"

"I--"

And then it was there, between them, its red light flaring to life, speeding towards Goku. One of its wickedly sharp legs lanced towards his belly. Goku rolled to one side, fast enough to avoid a gruesome death but not fast enough to avoid being speared through the arm and pinned to the tree. He screamed in pain but was already bringing his legs up to kick its round metal body. Normally his kick should have driven clear through its body and out the other side, but without ki to enhance and protect his flesh and bone, his feet merely glanced off its surface. The other three legs oriented on him: one aimed at his head and two at his midsection.

"Kakarrot!" Vegeta's hand chopped down, severing the leg pinning Goku to the tree. Vegeta jump-kicked its body and sent it spinning into a nearby clump of trees.

"You're less powerful, idiot!" Vegeta yelled, dropping to the ground in a fighting stance. "Don't rely on sheer strength, because you don't have it. Use leverage! Use surprise! In short --" He shot Goku a quick grin that was half cocky smirk and half actual smile. "Fight like I always have to when I fight you, bastard."

Goku answered Vegeta's smile with one of his own, but it turned into a grimace of pain as he tried to pull the spider's leg out of the tree and out of his arm. The barbs on the leg, which had slipped easily through his skin, now shredded his flesh as he tried to wrench it free.

The spider stood awkwardly on its three legs and then vanished into the bushes again. By now, the woods were almost fully dark, and stars glimmered in the sky overhead.

"Move, Kakarrot! Get your back against mine so it can't sneak up on us! Stay in the open where it can't pin you!"

"I'm trying ..." Goku gave up on trying not to cause damage and tore his arm free, though he was aware that by doing so, he rendered that arm almost useless for battle. At the moment, being pinned to a tree was more dangerous than trying to fight with only one good arm.

Backed up against each other, the two Saiyajin circled slowly, trying to watch every direction at once.

"Our ki must have been blocked deliberately," Vegeta growled. "It's nothing more than a machine, hardly a threat to us at our usual power levels. If we could use energy attacks, that thing'd be toast."

"That might mean the ki block affects more than just us," Goku said, holding his injured arm stiffly at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers but he hardly noticed the pain; the usual adrenaline rush that he got while fighting had seized hold of him and he was eager for the creature to reappear so that the fight could resume. "It's possible that every ki fighter on Earth is similarly paralyzed ... Gohan ... Trunks and Goten ... Piccolo ... Kuririn ..."

"Even Freeza didn't have such technology."

"Somebody must, or we wouldn't be like this," Goku pointed out.

Vegeta opened his mouth to tell Kakarrot what he thought of that pearl of wisdom, but instead he yelled, "There!"

The spider dropped towards them out of the treetops. They lashed out as one, Goku clipping it on the left side and Vegeta on the right. The spider's body was again hurtled off into the brush.

"Go for its legs," Vegeta hissed. "They're not hard to break, and once we have it helpless, we can deal with the body."

They circled again, waiting for the next attack.

 _We really do make a good team,_ Goku mused, casting a look over his shoulder at the back of Vegeta's head. _Ever since the fusion, we've been able to move and fight almost as one person. But we can't do it when we're trying ... it's something that only works when we just let it happen. I wish Vegeta'd be willing train this ability, but he'd never admit that he's capable of working as a team with me ..._

"Kakarrot, now!"

Again the spider attacked, and this time, instead of trying to hit it Vegeta seized one of its legs in each hand, while Goku snared the third. The spider writhed wildly but it was immobilized. The two Saiyajin wrenched in opposite directions and the legs parted from the body in a sizzling shower of sparks. The round body fell to the ground and bounced a couple of times.

Vegeta chuckled and dropped the legs. Once again his gloves had come in handy; his palms were uninjured, though Kakarrot's one good hand was bleeding. He kicked the body savagely and watched it roll across the ground.

"Vegeta ..."

"Shut up, Kakarrot. This is my show. Which of us is more suited to an interrogation, huh?" He stalked the thing. Its red light flickered on and off, on and off. "Hey you," Vegeta snarled. "Who are you? What are you? What built you?"

The light flickered weakly. "Saiyajin ... lifeforms ... more dangerous than expected. Warning ..."

"Warning, huh? Who are you warning? You're all alone or hadn't you noticed."

"Warning ..." The red light flickered and faded.

"Huh. Worthless --" Vegeta's voice faded out as his brain went into overdrive.

 _Stupid. Stupid. Of course it's not alone. It has a million buddies and of course they must have some way of communicating with each other ..._

Vegeta stomped on the body and heard the crunch of shattering circuits.

"That was an interrogation?" Goku said.

"Shut up, Kakarrot." Vegeta spun around, searching the night sky. He almost didn't see it in time. A lone red light had appeared behind Goku, rocketing down towards them both.

"Get down!"

They both hit the ground and the newly arrived spider sped past them, braked itself on a tree and rocketed back towards them. It was horrifyingly fast, faster even than the first -- or possibly just operating at a higher power level. Goku threw himself to one side, Vegeta to the other. The machine reoriented on them.

"Ki, my kingdom for some ki ..." Goku moaned.

"You'll have to use your brains, Kakarrot. Which means you're probably screwed. I, on the other hand ..." Vegeta scooped up a handful of cold, soggy dirt and threw it at the spider's red light. He missed on the first try, but scored on the second, covering it with mud.

The red glow of the light could still be seen dimly through the mud, but then it vanished, and, in the darkness, so did the spider.

"I thought you were supposed to be the smart one," Goku grumbled. "Now we can't see it."

"No ... but it can't see us, either," Vegeta said triumphantly.

"That's its eye?"

"I think it uses infrared or something similar. Notice how the other one would have to turn its light on in order to aim at us? It probably has other senses ... it can probably hear us ..." Realizing what he was saying, Vegeta shut up.

There was a faint scritching sound and Goku said suddenly, "Hey Vegeta, I think it's cleaning its --"

"Shut up!"

The spider came out of nowhere. As Goku had started to say, it had managed to wipe most of the mud off its optics, whether with its legs or by wiping itself on some of the surrounding vegetation, and the red light lit up balefully as it aimed itself at them. But they were ready, and as they sprang out of its way, each of them grabbed and yanked on one of its legs, tearing them off and leaving it suddenly two-legged. Unfortunately, where the shock of losing two legs would have caused any mortal creature to pause with pain, the spider was completely unaffected and, rolling with the tug on its body, seized Vegeta around the waist with its two remaining legs and flipped him up and over its head with astonishing strength. He crashed through several stands of trees and when he slammed into the rocky mountain soil, it felt like being flung into concrete. He was unable to use his ki to pad his fall and lay where he'd landed.

"Vegeta!" he heard Goku scream, unhelpfully, from some distance away.

The impact of hitting the ground momentarily stunned him. He wasn't unaware of his surroundings, just unable to move, and he watched the spider straighten out above him, gracefully, at the top of its dive, and then the red light bore down on him, the spider's two remaining legs pointing towards him like twin spears, and he thought in amazement, _I survived Freeza, Cell and Buu, only to get killed by a damned pathetic robot ..._

But it didn't kill him. Something dark flung itself between Vegeta and the plummeting spider. There was a thunk of metal hitting flesh, a stifled gasp, and one spearpoint burst from Goku's chest and touched Vegeta's neck lightly.

They were nose-to-nose, Goku with his arms braced on either side of Vegeta's body, the spider impaled in his back. Then Goku grinned a faint, bloody shadow of his normal grin and said, "Sorry, I know you'll be mad at me for doing that ..."

He pitched forward on top of Vegeta, shoving the spider's sharp leg-tips an inch or so into Vegeta's skin. The sting of the weapons that should have killed him shocked the prince out of his momentary stunned state.

"DAMN YOU!" He wasn't sure if he was yelling at the spider or at the accursed, stupid, noble idiot who was bleeding to death on top of him. The spider was struggling to free itself, its barbed legs doing who knew what internal damage to Goku as it tried to tear loose. Vegeta reached around Goku and gripped one of its remaining legs in each hand, tearing them loose from the body with strength born of rage and hate. He smashed the body with his unaided hands and threw it away as the red light died. Then he sat up, trying to lift Goku's body without touching the spider legs and doing any more damage.

"Kakarrot, hey Kakarrot ..."

He laid Goku on his side -- couldn't lay him on his front or back without pushing the spider legs deeper in or out. Goku was still breathing. One of the legs had gone through his left shoulder, the other through the right side of his chest. Saiyajin hearts were oriented to the left, like human hearts, so it should have missed any of his internal organs, except possibly the lungs. Saiyajin lungs were also resistant to puncture, compared to those of Earth mammals, and could often do a bit of self-repair without flooding with blood -- Saiyajin had not gained their reputation for being nearly impossible to kill without good reason.

"Kakarrot, can you hear me?"

For a moment, Goku lay still in the darkness; then his head moved in a slight nod, and Vegeta felt a tight knot that he had not been aware of (and would never acknowledge) relaxing in his stomach.

"Kakarrot, we have to move. There'll be more of those things on top of us any minute. We have to get out of here and just hope that they don't know how to sense ki, or if they do, that our ki is low enough right now that they won't be able to feel us."

"I ..." Goku's voice was a thick whisper. "I don't think I can walk, Vegeta. Why don't you go on."

"Why don't you shut up, Kakarrot. You never have anything useful to say anyway." Vegeta put an arm around Goku's broad chest, trying not to touch the spider legs and not entirely succeeding. Why'd the idiot have to be so damn big? He let Goku lean most of his considerable weight on him, and got him off the ground.

"Vegeta, we can't move like this," Goku said, coughing.

"Kakarrot, listen to me. I'm helping you because you know how to survive in this goddawful Earth wilderness and I do not. So tell me where to go. We need someplace to hide from the spiders. Where can we go?"

"Caves."

"Oh, thank you so much Mister Geography, now could you _be a little bit more specific!"_ He started half-carrying, half-dragging Goku in a random direction, scanning the sky frantically for red glimmers of light, which so far had not appeared.

"These mountains around here ..." Goku raised his head. "They're riddled with caves and ravines. I don't know about any ... specific ones ... if we were closer to where I used to live with my grandfather I could tell you ... I knew all those hills, all those mountains, all those trees ... everything that lived near or far ..."

Great. The only thing less useful than an injured Kakarrot was an injured, raving Kakarrot.

"Caves," Vegeta reminded him. "Where do I look for caves?"

"Water," Goku said, coughing. "Look for water ... water carves caves ..."

Water. He cocked his head, using his sensitive Saiyajin hearing to focus on the sound of rushing water. There were many streams in these mountains and he walked towards the nearest, with Goku's weight dragging at his shoulder.

"I remember one time after my grandfather died, I found this little cave up in the hills," Goku mumbled, his head lolling against Vegeta's shoulder. "It had a spring at the back for clean water and I used to sleep up there sometimes when I was a kid. Green grass all around and tree branches that hung down over the moon. The moon, the full moon ... Do you know I killed my grandfather? I never realized it until I was an adult. I didn't know the oozaru form was part of me, you see. You ... you keep your senses when you transform into ape form, Vegeta, but I never have, it's the one thing you can do that I can't and probably never will ..."

"Kakarrot, if you don't shut up I'll finish the job the spider started on you ..."

Vegeta trailed off, looking up into the sky and seeing the one thing that he had hoped he wouldn't see. Among the white points of the stars were small red glimmers ... hundreds of them ... thousands of them ...

Robot spiders. Hunting. Hunting for them.


	3. Meanwhile, back at Capsule Corp...

Bulma picked up the phone to call Chi-Chi, but froze at a tremendous crash from elsewhere in the building. The humans and half-Saiyajin children spun around.

"That was a window," Dr. Briefs said. "Oh, dear. Do you suppose there are more of them? Fascinating creatures ... I wonder who created them ..."

Bulma's mind raced. For so long she had depended on the Saiyajin when danger threatened, but now the only nearby Saiyajin were her son and Goten, and they were almost as helpless as any humans. "The lab," she said. "Quick, to the lab! There are no windows and we can seal the doors, and we'll have all the tools we need to make something to destroy these creatures."

The boys didn't move at Bulma's urging, but stood side-by-side, glaring at the door with expressions not unlike their fathers'. "We're Saiyajin, Mom," Trunks said. "We never run away."

"Don't argue with me, you stubborn brat! Move!"

Mrs. Briefs gave a small cry and Bulma looked up to see that a spider (the same one? or different?) had appeared in the doorway of the room. Its red light focused on them, and Bulma wondered if it was just her own panic or if there was truly malevolence lurking in that crimson stare.

"Go! Go!"

They fled, slamming and locking doors behind them. The exterior door might have balked the spider, but it tore through the light interior doors as if they were made of tissue paper. In one leap it sprang over the fleeing humans' heads and positioned itself between them and the doors of the lab, as if it knew exactly where they were trying to go.

They skidded to a halt.

"Uh-oh," Bulma said. She had one boy's hand in each of her own. Now the children tore free of her and assumed battle stances. "Trunks! Goten! Don't try it!" she cried helplessly.

"Exterminate," the spider said in its flat metal voice, and suddenly it blurred and was gone from Bulma's sight. _It's moving so fast I can't even see it!_ she thought in horror. But the boys had vanished too. There was a loud clang and the spider reappeared, crouching on the ceiling with the panting kids beneath it. Bulma realized that a battle had taken place that she hadn't even been able to see.

"Quick! Come on!" They all dashed for the lab doors; Bulma grabbed the boys' hands again and dragged them with her. The lab had foot-thick steel doors (normally intended to keep things from getting _out_ of the lab, not into it) and Bulma closed and locked them with a sigh of relief, then gave a little shriek when her mother reached for the controls to open the door.

"Mom! What are you doing?"

"My cookie dough, dear," her mother said, giving Bulma a don't-be-silly-dear smile. "I left it uncovered. It'll dry out and the whole batch will be wasted."

"Mother! Forget about your cookie dough! There are killer spiders on the loose out there!"

The two boys plopped down on the floor, still breathing heavily. "We're so slow!" Trunks said, clenching his small fists in frustration. "It was all we could do just to keep it from hitting us! If only we could go Super-Saiyajin."

"Trunks, my arm hurts," Goten whimpered.

Bulma looked down at the little boy and saw to her horror that his sleeve was soaked with blood. "Goten! Oh, no ..."

While Trunks hovered anxiously underfoot, Bulma and her father laid Goten down on one of the tables in the lab. The wound turned out to be superficial; the child's upper arm appeared to have been slashed as if by a knife. Bulma was terrified that the injury might have poisoned him or transmitted some sort of space virus, and insisted on cleaning it thoroughly while Goten squirmed. Finally it was cleaned and bandaged, and a painkiller/tranquilizer had been administered, causing Goten's squirming to give way to yawning. Bulma picked up the little boy and he curled up sleepily in her arms. She felt a small pang; it had been years since her much more independent son had consented to be hugged like that.

"Is Goten okay? Goten's okay, right?" Trunks asked in worry.

"He's fine. He'll just need to sleep for a little while." Bulma handed the child to her mother, who took both boys off to one of the cots that Bulma and her father kept in the lab for their frequent all-nighters.

"I'd better call Chi-Chi and find out what's going on over there," Bulma said. She quickly discovered, however, that communications with the rest of the city were down. A few of the news channels were still on the air, reporting rampant destruction and many deaths.

No sounds had come from the lab doors. Scanning the Capsule Corp. buildings through the various security cameras, Bulma and her father could find no sign of the spider. The animals all appeared to be fine.

"It must just be hunting humans, and leaving everything else alone," Dr. Briefs said.

"But ... why? Where did these things come from? It can't be a coincidence that the boys lost their ability to transform right before the spiders landed. Somebody's hatching some kind of plot ..." Bulma slammed her fist into the table, frustrated. "And there's nothing we can do about it!"


	4. Blood and Honor

Goku turned out to be right about the caves. The hillsides were riddled with them, and Vegeta found a crevice in the rocks that was almost invisible from the outside, but large enough inside for the two of them, with a stream right outside the cave mouth that not only provided them with a source of water but a convenient way to hide their tracks and smell. Goku had stopped rambling, and the silence was almost worse than putting up with his nonstop chatter. Vegeta lowered him down to the floor. "Stay there," he said, as if Goku could do anything else, and went back outside.

His comment about needing Kakarrot to survive in the Earth wilderness had been somewhere between an exaggeration and a downright lie. While Vegeta was unfamiliar with Earth's native life and geology, he'd had years of experience under Freeza's command at getting thrown into an alien ecosystem and having to scavenge to survive. Right now, they both needed warmth more than anything else, Goku in particular. Vegeta gathered armloads of brush and carried them back to the cave, where he made a pile between two rocks.

"Kakarrot. Up."

Goku had apparently passed out completely, so Vegeta dragged him over against the wall and covered him, still trying not to bump the spider legs too much -- he knew he had to remove them, but he hated the idea of trying to do it in the dark, with those wicked barbed edges.

He was reasonably good at wilderness survival, but he'd never had to do it without ki, which made a huge difference. So many little things he'd taken for granted could no longer be relied upon. Like ... building a fire. How did anyone start a fire without ki? Bulma could surely devise something -- actually, come to think of it, humans must have some relatively simple technological solution, but that certainly didn't help him since he didn't have any of it. They needed a fire. A pile of branches simply wasn't going to cut it. The night would be cold, and he was already shivering himself in his soaking-wet training outfit. Without ki, they'd both be popsicles by morning, hypothermic at the very least, and Goku would probably be dead.

How do lesser races stand this ... this weakness? he cursed inwardly. Vegeta strode to the mouth of the cave and looked out. The red lights still winked on and off in the sky. A few bursts of ki would annihilate the pathetic creatures. Instead, here he was _hiding_ from them, like a child or a coward.

That thought was almost enough to drive him out of the cave ... but common sense stopped him. He and Goku together had been barely able to kill two of them, and it had ended with Goku seriously injured. By himself, against thousands of them, he knew he wouldn't stand a chance. He had to accept his own weakness, and that infuriated him.

He could leave.

He _should_ leave. If he kept moving, he'd stay warm enough and also avoid detection by the spiders. Once he made it to some sort of civilization, he could contact Bulma -- he refused to consider the possibility that she wasn't still alive -- and she could surely figure out what was blocking him from being able to use his ki.

Vegeta looked over his shoulder at Goku. The other Saiyajin was a dark, immobile shape in the deeper darkness of the cave. Even from here, Vegeta's keen sense of smell could detect the faint, metallic tang of Saiyajin blood. Kakarrot's blood.

 _He's weak. Helpless. Leave him._

It was the right thing to do, he told himself. It was stupid to stay here, practically an invitation to the spiders to find him. Kakarrot would most likely be dead by morning anyway. The weak are abandoned and the strong move on. The weak die; the strong survive. That's how the universe worked. His father had taught him that, and then Freeza had hammered the lesson home, year after year.

The weak cling together and die. The strong survive, and stand alone.

He stood in the mouth of the cave, torn by indecision.

 _"I don't think I can walk, Vegeta. Why don't you go on."_

Kakarrot had even told him to leave. The idiot wouldn't blame him if he did; Vegeta was sure of it. Kakarrot's mind worked that way. Vegeta had lost count of the number of times he'd betrayed Kakarrot in the time they'd known each other -- attacked him, abandoned him, lied to him. Didn't the fool remember all those times? Yet whenever it mattered, whenever Vegeta was about to die -- there was Kakarrot, getting in the way, helping out whether it was wanted or not.

Go on, he told himself. But still he didn't move.

The weak die. The strong survive. Yet ... the thing that his father and Freeza had never taught him, the hardest lesson he'd ever had to learn was that no one, no matter how powerful, could be strong all the time.

Look at Kakarrot. He was (shameful as it was to admit it) the strongest person that Vegeta knew ... possibly the strongest he'd ever known. Yet right now, Goku was helpless as a child.

Helpless as Vegeta had been when Goku threw himself between Vegeta and danger, as usual, and had taken what should have been Vegeta's death blow for him ...

Snarling with impotent rage, Vegeta looked down into the valley, and he realized that not all of the red glow was from the lights of the creatures' eyes. Some of the vegetation that had been set ablaze by the crashing meteors was still smoldering.

Fire!

Vegeta's eyes widened, and he almost smiled. He turned to look over his shoulder at Kakarrot again, and this time some of the hard edge had gone out of his eyes.

"Kakarrot. I need to leave ... for a few minutes."

There was no response. Goku was still unconscious -- or ... something. Frustrated by his continuing inability to sense ki from a distance, Vegeta crossed the cave floor to the other Saiyajin and touched his face lightly to make sure he was still alive. Goku's skin was very cold, but through the skin-to-skin contact, Vegeta could feel Goku's faint ki.

Vegeta turned, and left, running with silent speed into the forest.

He easily eluded a couple of spiders wandering about under the trees, their red lights turned dim. It was much easier to be the stalker than the stalked. Still, the spiders did seem to be actively looking for the two Saiyajin. Vegeta suspected that the spiders could not sense ki or they would have already found them, but he didn't like this, not at all. Unable to fly, nearly unable to fight, he'd never felt so helpless in his life and he thoroughly hated the feeling.

He came to the edge of the blackened area where the first spider had crash-landed. The acrid scent of smoke stung his sensitive Saiyajin nostrils. Nothing was actively burning, but a lot of the damp vegetation was still smoldering weakly, producing the glow that he'd seen from above. Vegeta gathered some leaves and bark, and used them to wrap up a package of coals. On the way back to the cave, he saw no more spiders, but every once in a while a red light went by in the sky, low and searching.

He hadn't fully realized, until he found himself back at the cave, that he was really going back after all. Vegeta sighed.

"Damn you anyhow, Kakarrot."

Goku remained where he'd left him. Vegeta, shivering in the earliest stages of hypothermia, longed to build a blazing bonfire, but instead he built a small, low fire with the driest wood he could find, as close as possible to Goku. The cave would shield the light from being seen, and hopefully what little smoke the fire produced would be mistaken for smoke from one of the blazes started by the meteors.

Vegeta bent over the flames, relaxing as the fire's warmth drove out the chill of oncoming hypothermia and dried his clothing. Then he turned his attention to Goku and found a pair of dark, pain-glazed eyes on him.

He would never say a thing and he didn't realize that his happiness showed in his own eyes. Goku responded to it, though, and grinned slightly. "I see you got a fire going," he murmured.

"From the fire in the valley. It was still burning. I got some coals."

"That's smart, Vegeta," Goku mumbled. "I would never have thought of that."

 _Quit complimenting me. Don't you know I was going to abandon you, you jerk? I'm not one of your stupid friends. I never asked for your damn second chances so quit giving them to me._

"Kakarrot," he said, looking away. "Those spider legs are still in your body. I need to get them out ... doing so might kill you, but as long as they stay in, they're going to keep causing damage and might even allow the spiders to track us."

"I understand," Goku whispered. He raised his upper body, though it must have cost him greatly to do so. "Do it, Vegeta."

Vegeta still couldn't look him in the eyes. He knelt down beside Goku.

 _All it would take would be a little twist,_ said a voice inside him, a voice that sounded a little like his father and a little like Freeza. _He's dying anyway. You hardly even have to hurry it along. He's a burden to you as he is ... and your damned conscience won't let you leave ... but if he's dead then your conscience can go screw itself and you'll be able to survive. It could even be an accident. The strong survive ..._

"I'd rather die than do that," Vegeta whispered to the voice, swallowing nausea.

"Vegeta, hurry," Goku said, his arms trembling with the strain as he held himself upright.

Vegeta took hold of the spider leg through Goku's shoulder. The legs had thrust in from the back ... so he should be able to pull it through from the front, so that the barbs would slide easily through the flesh without causing too much more damage. He gave a small, experimental tug, and Goku gasped in pain. The spider leg felt as if it was hung up on bone.

 _I really might kill him by doing this. But I can't leave it in; I can't move him without taking the risk of catching it on something and doing far worse damage._

"I'm going to try to do it in one pull," he said.

"Go ahead."

Vegeta gripped the blood-slick metal and wrenched at it. The spider leg came free in a gush of blood, drenching his hands and the front of his tank top. Goku didn't scream or make any sound at all; he merely slumped forward, unconscious.

"Shit," Vegeta whispered. He needed to stop the bleeding immediately; Goku couldn't stand to lose much more blood. He tore some strips from Goku's gi and made a crude bandage. The blood seeped through the orange fabric, but at least it seemed to be slowing.

And that had been the easy one.

Vegeta lightly touched the spider leg embedded in Goku's chest. It had to have missed the lung or else, Saiyajin or no, the trip through the woods would have finished him off. Still, Vegeta couldn't believe that he could actually get it out without killing him.

 _There's no other choice,_ he told himself, but then the self-doubt arose: _Are you just saying that because you want him to die? Oh, sure, you won't admit it to yourself, but if he dies, you'll be the strongest, and isn't that what you've always wanted?_

Vegeta looked down at himself, kneeling in a drying puddle of Goku's blood. His hands and the front of his shirt were dark and sticky with it. He looked like a murderer crouched above his victim. His hands trembled and he clenched them to get control of himself again, but the shivering didn't stop; it passed through him in an uncontrollable, shuddering wave.

 _I can't. I can't do it. If I pull that out and it kills him, I'll never know ... I'll never know if I wanted it that way ... if there was another way and I couldn't see it, wouldn't see it ..._

He couldn't stop shaking. Even the cold had not affected him so strongly. All the muscles of his body were rigid; if there'd been anything in his stomach, he would have thrown up.

"Kakarrot, tell me the right thing to do," he whispered. "You always seem to know. Tell me what I should do ... please," he added, almost inaudibly.

But there was no answer. Goku was deeply unconscious. The decision was his to make, and his alone -- and the consequences his to bear, as well.

Vegeta, by the sheer force of his considerable determination, steadied his hands. He grasped the second spider leg.

 _Kakarrot ... forgive me ... I still don't know if this is right, but I just don't have any choice._

He pulled.

This one, to his amazement, slid out easily, falling into his lap, a curved and jointed instrument of death. Blood came with it, but not nearly so much blood. Impossibly, the injury in the chest seemed to have done much less actual damage than the injury in the shoulder.

Vegeta forced himself out of his momentarily frozen state, ripping off more strips of Goku's gi (it barely covered his torso now, and one leg was partly missing) and bandaging the fresh wound as well as the injury to Goku's arm. He really should wash the wounds, but he had nothing to carry water with, and bleeding was nature's way of removing contaminants anyway. Besides, if infection did occur, the possibility was so far in the future that he couldn't even bring himself to worry about it. He was living hour to hour, minute to minute.

Breathing hard, his bloody hands still trembling slightly, he checked Goku's pulse and found it weak but steady. His hand lingered for a moment, resting lightly against Goku's chin and cheek, feeling the coldness of his skin but also the faint warmth that meant he was still, for the moment, alive.

 _Kakarrot, you tough bastard, now stay that way, huh?_

He rested his hand on Goku's face for a moment longer, a little longer than was really necessary, then rose quickly and went outside to wash the blood off his hands and body in the stream. The water was icy cold. He dipped a handful when he was finished washing and drank it, realizing that his throat was dry as sand. Kneeling in the shallow water, aware that he was courting hypothermia again but unable to summon the energy to care, he let his hands fall down at his sides and tilted his head back to look up at the sky.

For the moment, there was no sign of the baleful red light of the hunting spiders. There were only stars, hundreds, thousands, millions of stars, the same stars that, in much different patterns, had shone down on him on other worlds -- shone down on him as he killed, as he tortured, as he crouched in other streams and washed away the blood of genocide, washed and washed though it never seemed to wash away.

His fingers, numb with cold, trailed in the icy water. They were clean. The blood was gone. He hadn't realized until that moment how much he had changed, and though sometimes he still resented and fought it, he knew deep down that he would never want to go back -- back to being the proud, isolated soldier, as alone as the stars in the sky.

"Don't die, you tough sonovabitch," he said softly, to the stars, his only audience, though that wasn't really who he was speaking to. "Don't die, my friend."


	5. Elsewhere ...

Not surprisingly, Piccolo had been engaged in his favorite activity -- meditation -- when everything started to go wrong. To the extent that he enjoyed anything, he enjoyed meditating. In meditation was peace, and in peace, freedom from the demands of the world. When he meditated, he liked to balance himself between the natural forces of the world: between sky and earth, wind and water.

This meant he was meditating above a waterfall when he suddenly lost his ability to fly. In total silence, without changing position or uncrossing his legs, he plummeted. _Kami,_ he thought wearily, _this isn't setting a good tone for the day._

There was a tremendous splash, sending nearby birds flying from the trees. Piccolo went over the waterfall with a resigned look on his face and splashed down in the pool beneath. After a moment, he surfaced and looked around to make sure no one had witnessed that. Fortunately, no one had.

At least he hadn't been meditating above an active volcano this time.

Piccolo splashed ashore and discovered something unexpected as he hauled himself out of the water: he could barely stand up. The weights in his turban and shoulder pads felt as if they'd increased tenfold. _What the ..._ he thought, falling to his knees in amazement. He hadn't been this weak in countless years. He tried to summon a bit of ki to augment his strength, and then made the next unnerving discovery of the day.

 _This is bad. Very, very bad._

Piccolo shrugged out of his soaking-wet gear. At least now he could move unencumbered, but he still had no idea what was happening. Better find Gohan and Son, he thought grimly.

 

* * *

 

 

"Oh, Gohan ..."

Gohan loved the way her voice curled around his name--but more than that, the way her arms curled around his body, her lips around his. One part of his brain, the well-behaved little scholar still buried deep inside him, was yelling something about how his mother was going to kill him for this, but the vast majority of his mind drowned it out: for once, his animalistic Saiyajin half and his gentler human half were in perfect agreement. Both of them wanted this beautiful, willing woman entwined in his arms.

"Videl ..."

He shrugged out of his shirt, somehow managing to get it off without taking his arms from around her, and let it flutter away in the breeze, flapping towards the ground some eighty or ninety feet below them. Then he started working on getting her shirt off as well. He was engaged in this activity when, all of a sudden, they were no longer flying.

Videl's gasp of pleasure turned into a shriek of terror and that was the last thing Gohan heard before his world went black with a bone-crushing thud.

He floundered slowly back to consciousness and to the sound of Videl's tearful voice.

"Gohan ... Gohan, please open your eyes. Please, please don't be dead. Oh, Gohan, please ..."

Gohan blinked. At first all he saw was a flood of bright light on his retinas, but slowly it resolved into a late afternoon sky and Videl's face coming into focus, staring down at him with her dark hair falling wildly across her forehead and her big eyes filled with tears.

"Gohan?" the vision of loveliness said, blinking away the tears. "Are you all right?"

"Uh ... I guess so ..."

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

He looked. "One ...? Videl, where did you learn to make THAT gesture ...?"

"None of your business! What were you thinking about, letting us fall! You idiot! Why didn't you catch us?"

"Huh ... what?" He was still having a bit of trouble thinking. "You can fly too, Videl."

"You're the powerful one! You're the Golden Fighter, the Super Saiyajin. What happened?"

Gohan wondered that as well. "It's like all of a sudden I just couldn't gather up my ki anymore. Is that what you felt too?"

Videl nodded.

Gohan sat up stiffly. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed to be seriously injured. "Wow ... I can't believe we're all right after that fall."

 _"You_ may be all right," Videl snapped. "Because you fell on me, you jerk."

"I ... did?"

He realized belatedly that she was very pale, her cheeks tearstained, and holding one arm protectively against her chest.

"Videl, are you hurt?"

"Yes! Thank you for asking! I think my arm is broken. The arm you fell on."

"I'm really sorry, Videl." He reached for her arm but she jerked away, and made a soft sound of pain.

"No, don't touch it! I'll be fine until we can get some medical attention. We're only a short walk from the road; come on."

She stood up shakily. Gohan steadied her. Suddenly his head snapped up. Videl looked at him in confusion, then followed his gaze up to the sky.

"Is it a meteor shower?"

"I hope so. I really hope so." But one part of him knew that it couldn't possibly be a normal meteor shower. It never was.

 

 

* * *

 

"HAAAAAAA!!!!" *crack*

"Wow, that's really cool!" Kuririn enthused.

"Pay attention to your own fight, idiot!" Eighteen snapped, severing another spider's body from its legs with one swift kick.

Kame-sennin's island was crawling with the creatures because all the ones who had fallen into the surrounding ocean had crawled onto the land to get out of the water. Unfortunately they didn't seem particularly affected by the water in any way--none of them fell over and shorted out. Instead, they oriented on the various humans and not-quite-humans on the island--none of whom had realized anything was wrong until they started to power up to fight and discovered that they couldn't.

Of them all, Eighteen was by far the least affected. She'd never relied that much on ki anyway. Her body was inhumanly tough and fast, virtually impossible to damage with conventional weapons, let alone destroy. She cradled Marron against her chest in one arm, not daring to put down the little girl with so many of the metal monsters around, and decimated one after another.

The others were not faring so well. Kuririn and Yamcha had once been among the most powerful humans on the planet, but now both were out of shape from years of inadequate training. Oolong and Pu'ar had never been able to fight anyway; the pig was hiding under a table, squealing in terror as spider legs speared viciously through the wood, splintering it in a tattoo of death--and all Pu'ar could do was float above Yamcha's head, yelling warnings to him as he tried to avoid the spiders' attacks.

Master Roshi had vanished utterly.

"Where's the old guy?" Yamcha yelled at Kuririn, ducking another spider. The two of them had managed to survive so far only by dodging rather than attacking.

Kuririn didn't have the breath to reply. They both got their answer, however, when a speedboat appeared from the far side of the island, executing a wide turn over the foam-capped waves.

"Get in!" Master Roshi shouted at them, waving frantically. The sea turtle bobbed along beside the boat.

Eighteen grabbed Kuririn's arm and made a powerful leap for the boat, dragging her husband and daughter along with her. Pu'ar transformed, briefly, into a floating Yamcha analog, confusing the spiders for a moment while Yamcha made his own escape to the boat.

"Oolong!" Kuririn yelled. "Run for it!"

"Run for WHAT?" the pig squealed, practically blurring as he dodged the spiders, which luckily for him were not trying very hard. They seemed uncertain what to make of him.

"One of us is going to have to go get him," Yamcha said reluctantly.

They all looked at each other. Several spiders were trying to climb into the boat, providing a brief distraction as they had to kick the creatures off into the water.

"Oh, come on, he's our friend and he needs our help," Kuririn said, and stood up in the boat, preparing to jump to shore.

A hand on his chest stopped him. Wordlessly, Eighteen thrust Marron into her husband's arms and sprang ashore. A minute later, she reappeared, leaping on the backs of the spiders as if they were stepping stones, with Oolong clutched by the ears in one hand. "Ow ow ow ow --" he was shrieking. Eighteen threw him into the boat and then sprang in herself, and Master Roshi gunned it, full throttle, sending them shooting out into the empty sea.

"My ears!" Oolong wailed, rubbing at the injured appendages. "What do these look like to you, handles?"

"You're alive, aren't you?" Eighteen retorted, taking back a whimpering Marron from Kuririn.

Yamcha nudged his short friend. "Man, Kuririn ... I've said this before, but I'll say it again: I'm glad she's on our side."

"... now," Master Roshi added, looking over his shoulder from the boat's helm.

"I heard that," Eighteen gritted, cradling the little girl.

 

 

* * *

 

"How's Goten, mom?" Bulma asked without looking up from her worktable.

Mrs. Briefs sat down beside her daughter. "The poor child is still asleep. I gave him another painkiller."

"I want to go see Goten, mom," Trunks protested.

"No. Not now. Grandma is taking care of Goten and you have a job to do."

Since both Bulma and her father couldn't be spared from their work, Bulma had appointed Trunks in charge of communications. He was scanning the TV channels, finding the ones that worked and keeping them up-to-date on events outside the lab. It had gotten dark outside, and the glimpses that Bulma got of the TV screen looked like a war zone: lurid flashes of red and blue lighting up scenes of rubble and devastation.

"Yeah! Hit 'em!" Trunks yelled, punching the air. Bulma heard a series of explosions from the TV. "Hey, Mom, it looks like this time the army's actually good for somethin'. They just took out a bunch of those creepy things in one shot."

Bulma tuned in with half an ear to the TV announcer, who was saying that the army had been able to protect most of the cities and larger towns so far. That was good news, and Trunks was right; it appeared that compared to most of the things they'd fought, the metal spiders were not much danger. The problem was, there were just so many of them. The army couldn't be everywhere. She wondered desperately where everyone was. Vegeta, Goku, Gohan, Kuririn ... Kami, she hoped nobody was dead.

"Try the emergency communicator again," she said to Trunks.

"Okay, Mom."

Years ago, after the Cell Games, Bulma had left emergency communication devices at both the Turtle House and at the Sons' place, making them promise to use them if something happened that tied up or interrupted radio frequencies. The communicators used a private satellite uplink and unless something was jamming it, should be able to be used even if all communications on Earth were down. So far they hadn't been able to get a response from either place.

"Still not answering, Mom."

"Keep trying," Bulma said. She was more worried about Chi-Chi than anyone else. Turtle House had no shortage of defenders, but Chi-Chi would have been all alone unless Gohan was with her, and as tough as Chi-Chi was, how could she defend herself against creatures that moved so fast no normal human could see them?

"How's it going over there, Dad?" she called to her father.

"Hmmm," was the only reply.

Bulma sighed and went back to her work. She and her father had divided their tasks. Bulma's job was to come up with personal defenses against the spiders. So far, she had created a modified version of the Saiyajin armor that she'd made for her friends during the Cell Games; rather than being specialized to repel ki blasts, it was tough and flexible to withstand punctures. It wouldn't protect the arms and legs, but at least the vital areas of the body would be covered, including the head if she could get anybody to wear a helmet. (Saiyajin, she had discovered, hated covering their heads; it was an aversion almost akin to a cat's hatred of water. She suspected that it had to do with needing to have their sharp senses unencumbered.)

Once she had finished the armor design, she automated the process of making it and expected to have enough for her friends in an hour or so. Now she turned to personal weapons. This was a little harder, because they had not managed to injure a spider and weren't sure what could hurt them. From watching the news, she could see that concussive weapons, such as bazookas and grenades, were very effective, so she focused on that sort of thing. No use spending her time building lasers if they were shielded against lasers, which they seemed to be to at least a limited degree.

Every once in a while she cast a look over her shoulder at her father. His job was much harder than hers; all he could do was analyze the appearance of the spiders and try to work out what their weaknesses might be. It appeared from the news video that they weren't encumbered by rain, mud, or various forms of radiation. The military had tried hitting them with electromagnetic pulses and it hadn't even slowed them down. Too bad; that was the first thing Bulma would have tried.

"Woah Mom," Trunks said suddenly. "Holy moly. Lookit this."

Bulma set down her tools and craned over her shoulder. Her mother and son were both clustered around the TV in rapt fascination; even her father had taken a pause to look. She could hear that the announcer's voice had changed, from agitated and excited to soft with ... fear?

"Hey, I can't see," Bulma protested. She got up and came over to shoulder her way between her parents.

The TV screen showed a night sky, speckled with the by-now-familiar red glow of the spiders' sensors. And against the stars was a great, dark shape. She couldn't get any idea of the scale on the TV, but it had to be huge.

"It's a spaceship," she whispered.

"I guess they had to get here somehow," her father said.

As Bulma watched, a detachment of military planes appeared in one corner of the screen. They looked tiny against the ship's bulk, and she watched them shrink and shrink until they were invisible--damn it, how big was that thing? Suddenly red light flared near one end of the ship. A moment later, they could all see the flaming trails of wreckage falling from the sky.

"They can't get anywhere near it," Dr. Briefs said. "The spiders don't seem to have energy weapons, but the ship must."

"The spiders are just some sort of advance guard, then," Bulma said. "Whatever's on that ship is what we really ..." She trailed off, remembering that her son was listening. Her son was, however, half Saiyajin (half Vegeta, for that matter) and rather than fear in his blue eyes, she saw excitement.

Bulma _was_ afraid--afraid for herself, for her family, for her friends, for her world. But the fear did not rise and become panic. An icy calm had gripped her when she first realized that she couldn't depend on the Saiyajins to win this fight, and it still held her in its grasp. She wasn't much of a fighter, but it wasn't might that would win this battle; it was brains. And at that, Bulma excelled.

Right now they had two primary problems, she mused. One problem was finding their friends and getting them all together in one place. The other was defeating the spiders--which, she now suspected, would need to involve getting onto that ship. She had no idea how to do the second part. But as for the first ... she was getting the glimmerings of a plan.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Meanwhile, the small group on Master Roshi's speedboat had made an unpleasant discovery of their own: the spiders could fly. Not that fast, compared to how phenomenally fast they were on the ground, but they were definitely capable of flight.

"This isn't good!" Kuririn yelled, jump-kicking a spider out of the sky into the water. It was starting to get dark; luckily the red lights on the spiders made them easy targets. At the moment the humans had the advantage, because the spiders couldn't keep up with the boat and also were not very good at attacking on the run. But they were all getting tired, except for Eighteen, and she was encumbered with Marron. Kuririn had suggested handing the child over to him, or to a noncombatant such as Oolong (he almost got a broken nose for that suggestion, from both parties), but Eighteen wanted to keep Marron with her, since she was most capable of protecting their daughter.

"All right, let's try a change of tactics," Master Roshi muttered. "Hands inside the vehicle, everybody!"

They all promptly retreated to the middle of the speedboat, unsure what was about to happen, but not very confident that it would be safe in any way. Roshi hit a button and a jointed enclosure spread over the top of the boat, sealing them inside in a matter of seconds.

"Why didn't you do that before?" Yamcha snapped.

"It's airtight," the old man replied, unperturbed. "With all of us in here, we only have enough air for a couple of hours unless we open it occasionally. But in the meantime, we can do this ..."

He pushed the boat's joystick control forward and down, and it dived like a submarine. The startled spiders banked in the air and then vanished from view above the water.

Marron giggled with joy as they sank through the dark water, scattering confused schools of fish and an occasional eel.

"What if the spiders can swim?" Kuririn said after a moment.

"They probably can, at least a little bit," Master Roshi said. "But with those legs shaped the way they are, they'll have even more trouble maneuvering in the water than in the air. We should be able to avoid them easily."

They all looked at each other in the darkening cabin of the boat, an unspoken question hanging in the air. Sure, they could avoid the spiders, but only for so long. Somehow they had to deal with the menace. But how?

 

 

* * *

 

 

Half a world away, the sky was still bright, the sun standing near noon--which was fortunate for two humans who were able to take advantage of the light to avoid their pursuers.

"Tien, there are too many of them!"

"I know, I know," Tienshinhan growled, leaping to avoid a piercing claw. He picked up Chaotzu in one powerful arm and bounded up the mountainside, but the spiders didn't hesitate: they rose into the air, and flew.

Tienshinhan was glad now that he'd always preferred to rely on his own body instead of the seductive promise of ki. He had trained himself in ki techniques for the power they provided, but in general, his life with Chaotzu in the wastelands had left him with strength and agility that was possibly, at the moment, unsurpassed by anyone on Earth.

He had killed the first spider to land near him in a sneak attack, and two more in traps. This had led them to deem him a threat and start a full-scale hunt.

Luckily, he was also very, very familiar with this area, a fact that had enabled him to trap or elude his pursuers so far. This particular mountain had once been a mining claim, and it was riddled with old mineshafts. Tienshinhan located the nearest opening and leaped inside, then tugged at the rotten wood holding up the entrance until it collapsed in a shower of rocks and dust, burying the fastest of the spiders in the process.

"Are we trapped?" Chaotzu asked, coughing on the dust.

Tienshinhan started to shake his head in the darkness, then remembered that his small friend couldn't see him. "No," he said. "There are a dozen ways out of here. It's possible that some of those things might find them and use them for entrances, but by that time, we'll be long gone. We need to find Son and find out what's going on. If anyone knows, he will."

 

 

* * *

 

 

And back on the night side of the world, a small fire glowed against the darkness, trying and failing to drive back the chill from the air ...

Goku's shivering had finally stopped, but not in a particularly good way. He had drifted into a sort of stupor and didn't respond to Vegeta's attempts to rouse him. The wound in his shoulder was seeping blood again, and there was a rattling in his breathing that Vegeta didn't like at all.

Vegeta crouched over the small fire, feeding it little pieces of dry wood. But it wasn't enough, it wasn't enough. The heat barely reached back a few paces from the flames as the chill mountain night crept upon them. He felt himself begin shivering again. Both of them were in trouble, Goku for his insane heroics and Vegeta for letting himself fall into the same trap.

"Next time you get some stupid ideas about saving my life, just save us all the hassle and don't do it, would you?" he snapped at his unconscious companion.

He sat down next to Goku and felt for the weak flutter of the other Saiyajin's pulse. It was much feebler than he would have liked, and he could barely feel Goku's ki at all.

"Come on, Kakarrot. Remember how that brat of yours carried on when you died fighting Cell? Imagine how much noise _two_ of them will make if you die out here."

There was no response. Vegeta sighed and sat back against the wall. Trying to remind Goku of his family, to snap him out of his near-coma, had instead reminded Vegeta of his own. He'd been halfway successful, so far, at keeping his mind from Bulma and Trunks, but now thoughts of them rushed in with a vengeance.

They were all right. They had to be. Bulma was smart and she had the entire resources of Capsule Corp. at her disposal. Hell, that crazy onna might wind up saving the world, who could know?

"Be safe, woman," he whispered, trying to send his thoughts to them across the miles. "You too, brat."

His eyes started to drift shut and then snapped open. He'd thought he heard a stick snap outside the cave.

Vegeta stood up slowly, his eyes fixed on the sliver of starlit darkness at the cave mouth. He started to take a step towards it, when suddenly a red light appeared in the opening.

Vegeta froze, knowing that he was outlined against the fire. Another light appeared by the first. Then another. Another.

They had been found.

Vegeta backed up towards Goku as the spiders stalked into the cave. They seemed wary of him; they must know that two of their companions had been destroyed by the two Saiyajin. But there were a lot of them. A lot. The glowing red lights outside the cave seemed innumerable. At least ten or twenty, he guessed, and possibly more that he couldn't see.

I'm going to die, he thought.

He glanced down at Goku. The thought of trying to escape slipped through his mind, but didn't linger. No, the prince of the Saiyajin would not run away. He would not flee an enemy and he would not leave a helpless fri--a helpless companion to be murdered.

"I do not want you to be the last person I see when I die, Kakarrot," Vegeta murmured, a smirk twitching at his lips. "I had hoped that the onna would be."

The onna ... He thought of Bulma one last time, sending her and Trunks a silent goodbye. _And goodbye to you too, Kakarrot; I hope we meet again in the other world, though I have no real hope of that._

He crouched as the first spider sprang. He couldn't win--but he would take a few of them with him.

 

* * *

 

Miles away, Bulma snapped her head up from her worktable, almost dropping the delicate tools in her hands.

"You okay, Mom?" Trunks asked, turning away from the TV screen and stifling a yawn.

"Yes. I'm fine." Bulma glanced over her shoulder. She thought she'd heard Vegeta whisper her name; and more than that, she had even felt his presence as if he was standing right behind her, his breath stirring the small hairs on the back of her neck.

Bulma shook her head. _Wherever you are, please be all right, my love,_ she thought, and bent back to her work.


	6. Rescue! ... but who will rescue the rescuer?

He was dreaming.

It was a peaceful dream, a happy dream. All around him, blue-green grass rippled to the horizon. The sun was warm, and he had a book in his lap. There were no demands, no responsibilities, no complaints, and particularly ...

... no irritating relatives ...

"Rise and shine, BAKA!"

He rolled over, resolutely ignoring the voice.

"On your feet! Up and at 'em! Early worm catches the bird! MOVE YOUR BUTT, BOY!"

With that, a bucket of water was unceremoniously dumped over his head.

The god of all creation opened one eye, then the other, and thought wistfully of the days when he was the ONLY god of all creation, and he had his planet all to himself, before a certain boy pulled a certain sword out of a certain rock ... He squinted up at his fifteen-generations-removed ancestor, who was wearing a purple jogging suit and a Walkman.

"What do you want," he mumbled, channeling his inner Kibito.

Another bucketful of water appeared out of nowhere above his head. Kaiobito rolled adeptly to one side and it splashed harmlessly on the soil of his homeworld.

"Is that any way to talk to your honored ancestor? On your feet! We'll start with a few laps around the planet and a couple hundred one-armed pushups and then settle down to the day's business."

Kaiobito dried himself instantaneously and climbed to his feet. Of all his ancestor's transitory interests, this fitness craze was turning out to be by far the most annoying. It was even worse than the week when he'd taken up the bagpipes, tuba and kazoo all at once.

"Or maybe I could go back to bed," he said hopefully.

"You don't need to sleep at all, idiot!"

"I know," Kaiobito sighed, and resignedly went through a few rudimentary stretches while his ancestor watched him like a drill instructor. "So what's going on around this part of the galaxy today?"

"Uprising on Tiuranis-IV. Star about to go supernova in Sector 3 ... that one might require attention soon. Some sort of mass ki disruption on Earth ..."

Kaiobito stopped stretching.

"Earth? _The_ Earth?"

"There is only one," his ancestor said. "Thank _ME,"_ he muttered under his breath.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Kaiobito snapped. "Why didn't you do anything?"

"It's not as if we're exclusively responsible for that planet, you know," his ancestor pointed out. "For a change, this problem is unlikely to affect any planet BUT the Earth. The nova is much more pressing ..."

"I have friends on the Earth!"

"You can't get sentimental about mortals, boy. That's always been your problem--"

"Where's the crystal ball?"

Moments later they were both kneeling by the ball. Rou laid his wrinkled hand on top of it.

"I refuse to show you anything if you're going to go dashing off without thinking, boy. As I said before: this problem involves the Earth, and only the Earth. It is not a threat to the greater galaxy, which is a far more important responsibility of yours--and therefore, you would be severely derelict in your duty if you risk yourself to save one small planet. You will not teleport anywhere without asking me first."

"Yes, ancestor," Kaiobito said meekly, eyes downcast.

Rou took his hand off the crystal ball. For a few moments, all it showed was white noise--static.

"Odd," the ancient Kai murmured. "We seem to be getting a lot of interference ..."

He moved his hands over the ball. "Ah. Just had to adjust for the disruptive effects of the ki-damping field. It appears to be created by several satellites in orbit ... here ... and here ..."

"Is it dangerous to the Earthlings?" Kaiobito asked.

"Not in any direct sense. It doesn't actually disrupt a living being's ki--it simply prevents those few beings who have learned conscious control of their ki from being able to summon it. There's a slight ki-suppressing effect, meaning that the average Earthling might notice that they're a little less energetic than usual, tired and grouchy, maybe can't exercise as long. But that's about it." He slapped the ball with the palm of his hand. "Come on, come on ... Aha. There we go."

The crystal ball cleared and the two Kais looked upon a battlefield that had once been a city. The buildings were melted piles of slag, swarming with metal creatures similar in appearance to Earth spiders. Most of the damage appeared to have been done by the humans themselves, wielding far-too-powerful weapons against their small, elusive targets. Now the spiders were upon them and they were forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat, but for every spider that fell, two more leaped forward. There didn't seem to be any end to them.

The Kais stared, struck silent by horror. "Did you know it was this bad?" Kaiobito asked at last, in a hoarse whisper.

The old Kai shook his head, momentarily subdued. "The ki-damping field must have prevented me from feeling the mass loss of life. I knew that there was a ship in orbit around the planet--"

"A ship? Where?"

Sighing, Rou tuned the crystal ball and they looked down on the great dark bulk of the ship, drifting in the middle atmosphere above the night side of the planet.

"Can you see inside it?"

Rou shook his head. "The shields around that thing make the damping field on the planet look like gossamer. I can't penetrate them and I doubt you can teleport inside, either. This might actually be a threat great enough to warrant our intervention--assuming that there was anything we could do."

"What about Son Goku? Isn't he fighting the spiders?"

"Without his ki, he's little more than an ordinary human," Rou warned, touching the ball. "Odd ... I can't seem to find his ki-signature ... oh, wait."

"What?"

"His ki's very weak." Rou took his hand away and the image of the ship faded into the interior of a cave, lit by the red light of the spiders' sensors.

Kaiobito gasped when he saw what was happening. "They're about to be killed!"

Rou saw what he was about to do and seized his arm. "Stop it, young moron! If you teleport down there, you'll be affected by the ki field too."

"But I can't let them die. The world needs Goku-san. Besides ..." Kaiobito added, glaring at his ancestor. "... He's my friend, as well."

"Hmm ..." Rou thought for a second or two--an eternity for the two Saiyajin trapped in the cave. In the crystal ball, the small figure of Vegeta intercepted a spider strike aimed at Goku's head with his own forearm. While it was trapped, struggling to free itself from his flesh, he crushed its body with a rock and then tore his arm free, apparently unaware of the splattering blood. He appeared to be in the grip of some sort of berserker rage. Blood flowed from numerous wounds on his body.

"I'm estimating that the field would take a couple of seconds to affect you," Rou said finally. "You would probably have time to teleport in and back out with someone; just don't stay too long."

"You're giving me permission to go?" Kaiobito looked hopeful, and desperate.

"I am. But don't risk yourself. As much of an idiot as you are ... the universe still needs you around for some reason."

"Thanks ... I think," Kaiobito said dryly, and smiled slightly. "See you in a minute." He vanished.

"Besides," Rou murmured to empty air. "... It would be a bit lonely up here without some young fool to talk to ..."

 

* * *

 

Snarling like an animal, Vegeta flung himself at his enemies. He didn't feel the pain of his injuries, only an overriding hatred for these puny robots, these unworthy opponents who had threatened his world, killed his friend (Goku might as well be dead; he probably would be in a few minutes anyway), separated him from his mate, and threatened the life of the last remaining prince of the Saiyajin race. He was going to die--but damn it, he'd die like a Saiyajin, with his hands and teeth sunk deep into his enemy.

Several spiders boxed him in. Vegeta was almost able to match their speed now, even without ki; the Saiyajin equivalent of adrenaline was far more potent than the human variety, and he had so much of it in his system that everything around him seemed to be happening in slow motion. He saw two spiders dart towards him at once, and ducked, sinking through the oddly heavy air as if he was floating in molasses; the hot sensation of the spiders' claws blazed down his back, tearing his tank top to ribbons, but he felt no pain and now he was coming up under them, seizing one in each hand and flinging them into opposite walls of the cave with a primal scream of fury. He spun around to see that another spider was going after Goku ... and this time it was too far away for him to make it in time, even as fast as he was. _Goodbye Kakarrot ... I guess I'll see you again soon ... or not ..._

... and then a brilliant flash lit up the cave, and the spider flew backwards as if it had been shot out of a cannon and slammed into the wall. _Ki?_ Vegeta thought dazedly. Even with his ki-sense dulled almost to nothing, the flash had been so close to him that he'd felt the bright flare of energy. _That was ki ... but how ...?_

"Vegeta-san!" cried a familiar voice. Kaio-shin (no, he reminded himself; Kibito _and_ Kaio-shin) was crouched beside Goku, one hand on his shoulder. "Vegeta, hurry and touch me! I can't stay here!"

Vegeta never thought he'd actually be glad to see the little god. The spiders were still reacting in shock to Kaiobito's sudden appearance, and Vegeta flung them out of the way, using his stocky body as a battering ram to force his way to Kaiobito's side.

"Hurry up! Put your hand on my arm!"

"Where are you taking us?" Vegeta demanded, laying his hand on the god's slender arm.

"To my world."

"No, don't!" Vegeta snapped. "Take us to Korin's! Kakarrot's dying--he needs senzu immediately."

"I --" Kaiobito began.

"I don't have time to argue with you. Take us there now!" Vegeta bore down hard with his bloody fingers on the god's arm.

"A-All right."

The three of them vanished, leaving a cave filled with confused spiders, and reappeared on the marble floors of Korin's tower.

"Korin!" Vegeta snapped, spinning about. "Are you here?"

"Where else would I be?" Korin inquired mildly, making his way towards them. "You bunch look a bit the worse for wear. Is it that bad on Earth?"

"Master Korin, hurry!" Kaiobito cried. "We need senzu beans for Goku-san and ..." He stopped. His eyes widened. "Uh-oh."

Vegeta, who was kneeling beside Goku, looked up and frowned. "What's wrong with you now?"

"I did this wrong," Kaiobito muttered. "I should have taken the two of you to my planet, then come back here and got the senzu ... then gone back there ... Oh, Me!" he cursed.

"Maybe it would help you talk if I shake you a few times," Vegeta suggested.

The god of everything looked at Vegeta and Korin. "I stayed in the ki-suppressing field too long. Now I can't teleport either. I'm as helpless as you are."

 

 

* * *

 

On Kaio-shin-kai, Rou slapped himself in the forehead.

"BAKA!"


	7. Here Comes the Cavalry!

"Wouldn't you know it, just when the little pipsqueak would actually have been useful," Vegeta growled.

Kaiobito started to sink back before the prince's anger, accepting the blame in his usual meek fashion, but suddenly he bristled as Kibito decided to defend his lord. "I saved your life, you know. I'm sorry I didn't do it very well, but at least you could thank me."

Vegeta snorted and turned away. "Karin! Where is that senzu?"

"I can see you're just as obnoxious as ever," Yajirobe grunted, coming into view with a small brown bag in hand.

Vegeta refused to dignify that with a response. He folded his arms, stood back and let Yajirobe and Karin feed Goku the senzu. He'd had enough Kakarrot-nursing to last a lifetime. However, his dark eyes remained fixed on the other Saiyajin until Goku gasped and drew a deep, even breath. Then he turned, allowing himself to release the breath he'd been holding--in the current state of affairs, he did not dare to rely even on the senzu--and walked to the edge of the tower, looking down into the clouds below.

What was going on down there? His fists clenched in frustration. He hated feeling this helpless, hated it more than anything in the world.

"Here, take this," said a voice at his elbow. Vegeta turned his head to see Goku holding out a senzu, with Kaiobito hovering nervously behind him. He took it, swallowed it, and felt the pain of his injuries ease, though it wasn't accompanied by the usual burst of power.

"Should you be up and walking around, Kakarrot?"

"Yeah. I'm fine now." Goku looked over the edge, and the warm smile on his face faded into a much colder expression. It was a strange thing about Kakarrot--most of the time, he looked utterly harmless despite his size, the kind of guy that you wouldn't think twice about letting your kids play with even if he was a total stranger ... but when he was angry, when his planet was threatened, you could tell just by looking in his eyes that he was, after all, a member of a race of warriors and killers.

"Is there any way down from this tower other than flying?" Vegeta asked. Looking over the side, he'd experienced the strangest feeling. It took him a moment to realize that it was mild vertigo, something he'd never felt before. What an odd feeling, to know that if he did fall over the edge, he'd tumble to his death, as unable to fly as any human.

"I guess it'd be possible to climb," Goku said uncertainly. "But it'd take a long, long time."

"We don't have a long time, Kakarrot!"

"I know that." Goku mused, staring down at the fluffy tops of the clouds below him. Suddenly he looked out to the horizon, and closed his eyes.

"What are you doing?" Vegeta asked.

"Calling an old friend," Goku said softly. "It's a long shot, but right now I'd try anything."

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Vegeta saw a golden streak materialize out of the cloud layer beneath them, climbing rapidly towards the small group on the edge of the tower.

"What the hell?" Yajirobe said, jumping backwards.

Goku laughed. "Kinto'un! It's so good to see you, old friend!"

"How can that thing fly when we can't?" Vegeta demanded.

Goku shrugged. "I don't know. I thought it was worth a try. Maybe whatever is blocking our ki only works on living creatures, or maybe Kinto'un uses some entirely different method to fly, who knows?" He stepped onto the surface of the little cloud.

"Where do you think you're going without me?" Vegeta snapped and started to follow suit. Goku blocked him.

"Vegeta, you have to be pure of heart to ride on Kinto'un. If you aren't, you'll fall."

"Oh," Vegeta said, looking down ... and down ...

"You could hold onto me," Goku offered.

"Are you crazy?? I'd rather fall!"

"It's up to you," Goku said. "I can fight the spiders by myself. Kinto'un can --"

"Stop right there! You still think you're better than me, Kakarrot? I --" Vegeta stopped. His eyes narrowed. He'd never managed to blatantly catch Kakarrot in the act of emotional manipulation; when he tried, he always just got the same wide-eyed, innocent look that Goku was giving him now. Over the years, though, he'd come to the conclusion that Goku was not nearly as dumb as he let on--especially when it came to getting Vegeta to do what he wanted.

"Absolute minimal contact," Vegeta gritted. "Touch me anywhere I tell you not to and I'll kick you off that cloud."

"But Vegeta, if you do that, you'll fall," Goku said, grinning as he held out his hands.

Vegeta disdained the offered hands and instead gripped Goku firmly by the forearms. "It would be preferable," he muttered.

"Wait!" Kaiobito cried. "Can that cloud hold another? Take me with you!"

"I could probably hold two people ..." Goku mused.

"I imagine I can ride it without needing to be held," Kaiobito offered, and stepped onto the cloud, only to sink immediately through. Goku caught him by the scruff before he could fall ("Gotcha!") and set him back on the tower. "What the--" Kaiobito protested. "I'm a god! Who could be more incorruptible than a god? Wait a minute ..." _This is all your fault, isn't it?_ he sent the irritated thought towards Kibito. _I was perfectly pure until you fused with me!_

"I can support two people. Just hold onto me and I'll hold onto Vegeta," Goku said.

This was looking less and less safe all the time. "Why are you coming with us anyhow?" Vegeta challenged. "You can't even fight! Without your ki or your ability to teleport, what use are you?"

The god looked as if he'd been slapped.

"Vegeta!" Goku snapped.

"No, he's right, but ..." Kaiobito faltered. "You do need me. There's a ship above the planet's surface, probably the source of the spiders. I can take you to it."

The two Saiyajin looked at him in astonishment. "A ship?"

"It's not too far from your Satan City, about as high above the ground as we are now."

"We do need to go there, then," Goku said. "But first we need to find our families and make sure they're all right." He nodded to the god. "Just hold onto me and we'll be off!"

Goku crouched down and Kaiobito nervously gripped his shoulders. "Are you sure this isn't a problem for you?"

Goku laughed. "Not at all. You're light as a couple of feathers. I can hardly feel the two of you."

"Shut up, Kakarrot," Vegeta muttered. Clearly he did not appreciate being compared to a feather.

"Thank you, Karin, Yajirobe!" Goku shouted cheerfully.

"You don't have to yell. It's not like we're a mile away," Yajirobe grumbled.

The cloud drifted somewhat sluggishly back from the edge as Goku shifted his balance to bring the weight of himself and his two passengers fully to bear on Kinto'un. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the cloud plummeted like a stone.

 

* * *

 

Much farther down, below sea level in fact, Master Roshi's submersible speedboat drifted gently with the waves.

In the dimly lit cabin, the refugees were passing time and waiting for the spiders to stop looking for them so they could resurface. Kuririn and Eighteen were leaned against each other in one corner, an old blanket wrapped around themselves and Marron. Kuririn and the child had both fallen asleep, but Eighteen remained awake, and vigilant.

Yamcha drowsed too, in another corner with Pu'ar curled up against his neck in a soft blue ball.

Oolong and Master Roshi had found another way to pass the time. It involved the stack of girlie magazines that the old man kept in the boat's toolbox instead of tools. Delighted chortling and the occasional squeal of delight came from the direction of the boat's controls.

"Keep it down over there. My daughter is trying to sleep," Eighteen snapped when her irritation with the two of them became too much to bear.

Suddenly the speedboat shuddered and everyone sat bolt upright just as dozens of red lights blinked on all around them.

"What -- they snuck up on us!" Yamcha yelled, scrambling to his feet.

"They can't move around underwater, you said. Let's shut down the engines and hide, you said. They'll stop looking for us and go away, you said," Oolong babbled to Master Roshi, who dropped pornography all over the floor as he made a frantic scramble for the boat's controls.

"I knew it was a mistake to hide," Eighteen said, crouching into a battle stance -- hampered slightly by Marron's small, sleepy body. "As soon as you let yourself become the hunted, not the hunter, you're at a disadvantage."

"Well thank you for that, Miss Know-It-All," the pig groused.

"I can't imagine why I rescued you. I should have let them skewer you like the pig that you are."

"Well, for my part, I don't have any idea why Kuririn married such a bi--AAAAAHHHH!!!"

The scream was prompted by a sudden charge from a half-dozen or so of the robots, who slammed into the speedboat's canopy. They were significantly slowed down by the water and the attack lost a lot of its impact, but even so, a fine spiderweb of cracks began to spread across the heavy plastic.

"Another hit like that and we're finished!" Kuririn gasped.

"What's taking so long up there?" Yamcha demanded in Roshi's direction.

His answer came in the form of a tremendous lurch of the boat's deck, sending them all sprawling -- except for the old hermit, of course, who was sitting down. The boat leaped forward and the spiders scattered as it plowed through them.

"Warn a guy next time?" Oolong mumbled, rubbing his head.

Pu'ar squeaked in fright, drawing everyone's attention to what lay ahead of them: spiders. Lots and lots of spiders. The red lights winked in the gloom of the ocean depths.

"How much air do we have left?" Kuririn asked, scrambling up to the shotgun seat.

"About half an hour, give or take a little," his teacher replied.

"We don't dare come up to the surface and open the canopy with so many spiders around," Eighteen said.

"Easy for you to say. You don't breathe," Oolong snapped in her direction.

"I do," she said calmly. "Just not nearly as often as you."

The speedboat sped alongside an undersea ridge, the flank of a series of underwater mountain peaks. "I may be able to shake them off long enough to replenish our air supplies," Master Roshi said over his shoulder. "Hang on!"

With that, he turned the boat into a near-vertical climb, sped over the top of the ridge and down a twisting canyon on the other side, whipping around rock formations at a terrifying speed, narrowly missing some of the razor-sharp outcroppings. All the passengers, aside from Eighteen, were looking rather green.

"Master, look out!" Kuririn screamed.

The boat's movement had disturbed the surrounding slopes and suddenly they found themselves in the middle of an underwater mud plume. They were still rocketing forward, but now they couldn't see where they were going, and the speedboat, like any boat, was not equipped with brakes. One side of the boat clipped something unseen and the entire craft flipped end-over-end. The passengers were flung into a tangled heap at one end of the boat.

"I think I'm gonna--" Oolong began.

"Throw up on me and die!" Eighteen shouted at him. The pig had ended up on her head.

"I'm starting to see a flaw in this plan," Master Roshi muttered, just before they crunched into the side of the canyon with a horrible sound of screeching metal. The hapless passengers were hurled into the other end of the boat, landing on top of the turtle hermit and Kuririn, who had managed to escape the general mayhem until that moment.

The boat was no longer moving, and after a few minutes, everyone started to stir and talk at once.

"Is everyone okay?"

"Are you guys all right?"

"Hey, whose foot is in my ear?"

"Ouch, that's my head ..."

"Where's Marron?"

"Whose hand is THAT?"

The last was from Eighteen, who had discovered Master Roshi trying to take advantage of the confusion. She hit him hard enough to knock him to the other end of the boat.

The rest of them untangled themselves. Aside from a few bumps and bruises, they all seemed to be unhurt.

The same could not be said for the boat. The engines had died and they were in near-total darkness. The deck appeared to be listing at about a 30-degree angle.

"There should be a flashlight in the toolbox," Roshi said.

"No there isn't," Yamcha retorted. "Maybe there would be--if someone hadn't taken everything out of the toolbox and replaced it with _pornography!"_

"Hey boy, that's fine art you're talking about--and I happen to know you've spent almost as much time with my collection as I have --"

"Does that mean we don't have any tools?" Kuririn asked.

"And we're about to have no air," Oolong mumbled.

Marron began to sniffle, and snuggled against her mother's neck as the rest of them contemplated their situation in silence. Suddenly all heads snapped up at an ominous creaking sound. Pu'ar clung to Yamcha's arm.

"What was that?" Kuririn asked.

"I believe that was the boat's damaged canopy," Master Roshi said in an unusually subdued tone. "It must be having difficulty standing up to the water pressure."

"Well, that's good to hear," Oolong said, on the verge of hysteria. "At least we'll drown before we suffocate."

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Go on, tell me I'm a genius," Bulma said. "You know you want to."

The others looked at the object in her hands.

"Looks like the dragonball radar," Trunks said.

It did look like the radar, though it was somewhat larger, with more controls on it.

"It works on a similar principle," Bulma said. "But this isn't a dragonball detector; it's a ki detector. Even without being able to use their ki, assuming that the problem is affecting everybody--and it must, or else Vegeta and Son-kun would be out fighting those creatures right now, and we'd see them on the news--their ki levels should be unaffected. So all we have to do is scan for the highest ki on the planet. Trunks, let me calibrate it on you."

Trunks stood still while his mother twiddled with the knobs, then ran a similar calibration on her parents.

"Good!" she said. "It looks like your ki is lower than usual, but still easily detectable. Saiyajin ki also reads differently from human ki, so I should be able to tell which of the readings are Vegeta, Son-kun and Gohan. And Piccolo will probably show up differently, too."

She began to scan.

"Okay ... it looks like the two highest ki readings are both together ... that way." She pointed. "If this is calibrated correctly, they're both Saiyajin, so must be Son-kun and Vegeta. Hmmm ... odd ... there's another high ki reading with them, and it's not human or Saiyajin. Piccolo maybe? Let's see ... I've got a cluster of high readings ... over there ... that's toward that old pervert's island, so that must be Yamcha, Kuririn and the others. Thank goodness, it looks like they're all right." She continued to scan. "This reading is so far away--it must be Tienshinhan and Chaotzu. Here's another high reading--oh!"

"Mom? What's wrong?"

"I just had a high Saiyajin ki but I've lost it. It's either dropped so low that the scanner can't pick it up, or ..." She covered her mouth with one hand.

"Dad?" Trunks whispered in concern.

"I ... I doubt it. Your father is strong enough to take care of himself." But privately she was fearful. That high ki had to be Vegeta, Goku, or Gohan, and it was at least as likely that Gohan and Goku were together as it was for Vegeta to be with either of them. The scanner was not sensitive enough to tell a full Saiyajin signature from a half-Saiyajin one.

"I'm getting another high ki not too far from where that one was--it's not a human or Saiyajin one, either. If the other anomalous reading is Piccolo, then who is this?"

"Someone from the ship?" Dr. Briefs suggested.

They all looked at each other. "I'm going," Bulma said.

"We need you here."

"They need me there. Either my husband or my friend is badly injured" _\--or dead--_ "and we still don't know where Chi-Chi is. I'll take one of the bigger capsule aircraft and gather together as many of our friends as we can --"

A small hand tugged on her leg. "Where's Daddy?"

Bulma jumped and looked down. "Goten! What are you doing out of bed?"

"Goten!" Trunks cried happily.

"I'm sorry, dear," her mother apologized. "I thought he was asleep."

"My arm feels better," Goten said, holding it out.

"Let Trunks's grandma take a look at it, sweetheart. I'm busy right now."

Trunks ran over to his friend. "Hey, Goten, we're going to go rescue my dad and your dad!"

"Neato," Goten mumbled, rubbing his eyes, still groggy from the painkillers.

"'We'?" Bulma echoed. "No 'we' here, young man. You're staying here with your grandparents ..."

She trailed off. She saw the stubborn look in Trunks's eyes--a very Vegeta-like look--and she knew exactly what her son would do if she left him behind. Her well-meaning but absent-minded parents would never be able to watch the two boys adequately. As soon as anyone's back was turned, the little boys would be out the door and straight into danger.

At least if she kept them with her, she'd know where they were.

"All right," Bulma muttered, closing her eyes. "You can come."

"You hear that, Goten?" Trunks bounced in excitement. "We're gonna fight some spiders!"

"No, you're not going to fight spiders. We're on a rescue mission right now, and you will stay in the vehicle. Also, I never said Goten could come. He's hurt."

"No I'm not," Goten said, hiding his injured arm behind his body and wincing in pain.

"Here, let me see," Bulma sighed, and unwrapped the bandages. The wound was not that deep to begin with, and the little boy's Saiyajin healing abilities had been hard at work while he slept. The injury was well on its way to being healed; in a few hours, he should be able to use his arm normally again.

"All right. Goten can come too. But stay in the vehicle, do you understand? If you try to go anywhere on your own, I'm bringing you straight back here."

She turned to her parents, while the boys made enthusiastic plans to kill all the spiders and save the world. "Dad, I'm going to try to be back in an hour or so. We can use the emergency communicators to stay in touch."

Dr. Briefs nodded. "I'll keep working on ways to ... eliminate these creatures." It was hard enough for him to acknowledge that his current work would be used for destructive purposes, but harder yet to use the word "kill", even referring to such inhuman creatures.

"If I stop checking in, I guess ... Well, I left the plans for the ki detector, so you can build another one. Keep trying to get in touch with our friends."

Bulma hugged her parents and then turned away. "Come on, kids."

The lab had a direct exit to Capsule Corp.'s rooftop landing pad. Bulma filled up a capsule case with what she hoped would be a useful assortment and then cracked the door open and peered out. She'd slapped together a rudimentary bazooka from a few odds and ends that she had lying around the lab. It wasn't pretty and it wouldn't win any design awards, but it should be capable of knocking down spiders.

The rooftops were dark and apparently devoid of glinting red lights. Distant explosions, and a baleful glow over the city, indicated that the fighting was going on elsewhere.

Bulma tossed a capsule and it puffed into a medium-sized personal aircraft. She'd had to strike a balance between size and speed, choosing a vehicle that could carry all the people she wanted to try to stuff into it (though it would not be a comfortable ride) while still being capable of outrunning the spiders.

"Quick! Get in!"

The boys scrambled into the craft and Bulma brought up the rear, slamming the door and locking them in. Sealed into the vehicle's cabin, she felt much safer--deceptively safe, she suspected, for the safety-glass windows might prove no more useful against the spiders than windows and doors had proven to be. But they could move quickly, and that gave them the advantage, for now.

She powered up the engines and lifted off from the roof. "Here," she said, tossing the ki scanner to Trunks. "You'll be my navigator."

"Cool!" Trunks enthused.

Goten stood up in his seat, looking over his friend's shoulder. "I wanna be a navengator too!"

"You can be co-navigators," Bulma said, punching in the coordinates where she'd detected the Saiyajin ki spike and then fall. "But good navigators wear seatbelts."

The boys obediently strapped themselves in. Bulma looked at her instrument panel as the vehicle's computer detected several small objects approaching them in the air. _Spiders ...?_ Yes, their takeoff had drawn some attention; she could see the red lights out the window, small but growing closer. Bulma pressed forward on the throttle, and was rewarded with a burst of speed. The instruments told her that they were easily outrunning the spiders.

So far, so good.

She set a course that would steer them around the battle zone, and then sat back to wait. And pray.


	8. Escape and Reunion

Darkness had fallen in the forest, and Gohan wondered where they were.

He didn't get lost easily. He'd spent his childhood playing in the woods behind his house--well, those parts of his childhood when he could escape from his mother--not to mention enduring Piccolo's harsh wilderness training when he was very young. Navigation was almost second nature to him. But this wasn't a normal situation. Videl was injured, and the two of them were being hunted like animals, driven deeper and deeper into the forest. A brief skirmish with one spider had quickly demonstrated that Gohan didn't have a chance of beating them in his current state--blood still oozed from the cuts in his left hand and right thigh where he hadn't been quite fast enough to dodge its attacks. So all they could do was try to avoid the spiders. At least the things weren't very good hunters; they apparently could not sense ki, and though their sense of hearing was reasonably good, they couldn't see very well at a distance and didn't seem to notice something walking softly towards them until it was quite close. They did not appear hampered by the darkness (leading Gohan to conclude that they "saw" in another spectrum, possibly infrared) but their glowing red lights made them even more visible at night, and further evened the playing field.

He wanted desperately to know what was happening in the rest of the world. Every once in a while he'd see a flash of light on the horizon and he knew that battles were going on elsewhere, but with his ki sense dulled to almost nothing, he had no idea if his father or brother or Piccolo or anyone else close to him was involved. He didn't know how his mother was; he didn't know how anyone was doing, except for Videl, and she was right next to him.

Videl was holding up well. Gohan had always been impressed by her toughness; for a human, and an inadequately-trained one at that, she was incredibly capable of taking physical punishment without complaint. They had made a crude splint for her arm from some sticks and part of his shirt, and though she turned pale whenever her arm accidentally banged into something as they ran through the woods, she hadn't said a word about it. Her strength was starting to flag now, and Gohan tried to stop for a rest whenever he could, but they had to keep moving to keep from getting circled by the red lights of the spiders. Gohan had tried several times to find a place to hide--a cave, an old dragon's den, anywhere that they could rest for a few hours without being spotted--but each time they had been found by the relentless spiders, and once came very close to getting trapped without possibility of escape. Now they stayed in the open and kept moving, still trying to get to a road or a house or anywhere that they could hide or summon help. However, Gohan was less and less sure that he hadn't just managed to get lost.

Videl stumbled, making a small, soft sound of pain. Gohan cast a sideways glance at her pale face and immediately came to a halt, cursing himself for an insensitive jerk. "I think I need to take a break," he said, trying to sound out of breath.

Videl gave him a grateful look and sank down immediately onto the grass. Gohan sat beside her, and saw that she was shivering.

"Would you like my shirt?" he asked. The night was getting colder and colder. He wondered if his father was still up in the mountains--it must be freezing up there. No; surely Goku wouldn't be affected by whatever was affecting him.

"I'm fine," Videl said resolutely.

He hesitated. She looked so cold, huddling in the loose dark tunic that she had been wearing when the sun was high and the temperature warm. After a moment, he scooted closer to her, as close as he dared get, a bit nervous about her reaction. He wasn't worried that she'd be mad at him for taking advantage of her--they'd already gone quite a lot farther than simple hugging--but rather, that she would feel that he was patronizing her by implying that she couldn't take care of herself. Videl looked up at him, frowned, and then leaned against him, so he put an arm around her.

"Body heat," he explained, and laughed sheepishly.

"Oh, shut up," Videl said fondly, leaning into his hug.

She might look cold, but she felt warm enough to him. Gohan appreciated the warmth, but it wouldn't have been quite the same if it had been anyone but Videl. He let his head slip down until his cheek was resting against hers, and then it seemed natural when her face turned until her lips could meet his.

It seemed crazy that their lives could be in such danger, yet it was so easy to forget when he closed his eyes and relaxed against her.

Suddenly Videl flinched away from him. Gohan's eyes snapped open. He was afraid for an instant that he had accidentally hurt her, but then he saw that she was looking over his shoulder. He started to follow her gaze and then froze himself when he saw the familiar red lights glimmering from the forest.

They were surrounded.

Gohan stood up slowly and Videl stood up with him.

They both turned around slowly. At least a dozen or so spiders crawled out of the forest, encircling them.

Gohan looked about desperately, but they were in a small clearing and there were no trees nearby to grab and pull themselves out of danger. He wondered how long they would last if they tried to run, then remembered the horrible speed of the spiders.

"Gohan ..." Videl whispered. "We'll have to fight them."

He wished she hadn't said it. The words made it seem too real. Gohan reached down and picked up a piece of deadwood lying at his feet. He broke it in half and handed one half to Videl. She took it in her good hand.

"Will this hurt them?"

"I don't know," Gohan said quietly. "It'll hurt them more than our fists will, at least."

"Don't you have any extra strength at all?"

He shook his head.

 

* * *

 

Piccolo lay back in the crook of an oak tree, where the wide branches met the tree's broad trunk. From the outside, he appeared to be asleep or meditating, but actually he was just gathering his strength. Grinding his fangs together in effort, he raised the stump of his right arm and forced a hand to spring forth from the lopped-off forearm. He flexed the new fingers cautiously and found that they seemed to be intact.

This time. But he couldn't keep this up.

Piccolo had discovered that the lost of his ki control hadn't made it impossible for him to regenerate, but it did make it more difficult. Under normal circumstances, his energy levels dropped every time he regenerated, but his energy levels were so high that he would be able to regenerate his entire body multiple times before it made a noticeable difference in his fighting abilities. But now, his energy level was so low that he could feel the drain every time he used his Namekian abilities. And he'd had plenty of opportunities in the last few hours. This time, he'd been genuinely concerned that he'd pass out from the energy drain, and he still felt dizzy, though the lightheaded feeling was thankfully passing.

His regenerating ability had enabled him to not only avoid getting killed by the spiders, but actually kill a few of them, by entangling their limbs in his own arms or legs until he could bash them with something, or by taking advantage of their distraction when they thought they'd killed or at least incapacitated him. However, he was starting to reach his limits, and the spiders just kept coming. Was there no end to them?

Suddenly Piccolo sat bolt upright. His ability to sense ki might be at a low ebb right now--it was actually a bit stronger than the humans' or Saiyajins', because Namekians were inherently more in tune with the natural flow of energy in the world, though he didn't know that--but there was one ki that he'd be able to feel even if it was on the other side of the world.

Gohan.

He'd been loosely aware of Gohan throughout the day--aware that Gohan wasn't that far away, but unable to make his way to the kid while trying to avoid the bulk of the spiders. Now, though, he'd felt a spike of energy followed by a sudden drop to the point where he almost couldn't sense it anymore. Gohan had just been attacked, and from the feel of it, injured.

Piccolo stood up on the tree limb, swaying as he was caught off guard by his own weakness, and coming very close to falling out of the tree on his head. Grimly he got control of himself. He felt better momentarily, his ki rebounding sluggishly from the effort of regenerating his arm, and he turned around, scanning the forest for that elusive sense of Gohan's presence. In a moment he pinpointed it.

"Hang on, kid," he murmured. "I'm coming."

 

* * *

 

Elsewhere ...

The canopy of the trapped and damaged speedboat boat creaked alarmingly as the water's pressure put further stress on the cracked material.

"We only have a few minutes before that gives way," Master Roshi said softly.

They all looked at each other. It wasn't completely dark in the boat's interior; there was just enough light that they could make out each other's faces, looking back with identical expressions of fear. Except for Yamcha, who was looking musingly at Pu'ar.

"Yamcha-sama?" the cat asked nervously.

"Pu'ar, you can turn into a boat, can't you?" Yamcha said.

Everyone turned to stare at him. There was a moment of silence.

"Yamcha, that's brilliant," Kuririn said.

"Two words I never thought I'd hear in the same sentence," Oolong muttered. "Ouch!" as Kuririn bopped him in the head.

"I'd be happy to help however I can, Yamcha-sama, but there's a problem," Pu'ar squeaked. "Oolong and I ... we don't gain strength, no matter what we turn into. I'm not sure if I could change into a shape that would protect all of you."

"That's why Oolong is here to help," Kuririn said, grinning.

Oolong had been too busy panicking to pay attention to the conversation up until that point, but finally his brain caught up with current events. "You're suggesting that I allow you people to get ... _inside_ me?" the pig screeched in outrage.

"Otherwise we're all going to die," Kuririn protested.

"No," Oolong retorted. _"You're_ going to die. _I'm_ a shapeshifter. Thanks for reminding me."

"No, you don't understand," Yamcha said, rolling up his sleeves. _"We're_ all going to die in a few minutes, but _you're_ going to die first."

A minute or two later ...

"I can't believe I agreed to this," Oolong muttered.

"Agreed isn't exactly the word I'd use," Kuririn said under his breath. "Begged pathetically is more like it."

Between the two of them, Yamcha and Eighteen had easily "convinced" the pig to help them.

"The five-minute limit might be a problem," Eighteen said. "Pay careful attention to how long you've been shifted."

Oolong made a faint squeak of dismay. "I didn't want that mental picture. I didn't want it _at all."_

Overhead, the canopy creaked and made a sharp snapping sound as one of the cracks suddenly extended by another few inches.

"Let's hurry this up, shall we?" Eighteen said calmly.

Master Roshi rubbed his hands together briskly. "We'll need to split up, obviously. You'll be with me," he leered at Eighteen.

"In your dreams," she retorted. "Kuririn, Marron and I can go together. Then you and Yamcha can go with the other shapeshifter."

"I'd like to stay with Yamcha-sama," Pu'ar squeaked.

"So that leaves ... oh, joy," Oolong muttered, withering beneath Eighteen's I-don't-like-this-any-more-than-you-do glare.

Master Roshi was rummaging in the toolbox. "What are you doing?" Yamcha demanded.

"Just getting my collection, of course."

They stared at him. "You're not bringing your porn," Eighteen said.

"You're bringing your kid, aren't you?"

"It's _different,_ you old pervert!"

There was another sharp snap from the ceiling and water began to drip on their heads. "We've got to go, now!" Kuririn yelled, taking Eighteen by the hand.

Pu'ar transformed in a flash into a small submersible, a blue-and-gray bubble filled with air. "Hurry, hurry! Get in!" she cried.

"I'm going! You can come if you want," Yamcha yelled at the hermit, who was digging frantically at the magazines. "Bring what you can carry, if you have to, and that's it!"

"But ... how can I choose? It's too dark! I can't see the pictures!"

Yamcha groaned and reached for the submersible's door.

"All right, all right! Stubborn brat," Roshi muttered, making a mad dash for the dubious safety of Pu'ar. The largest form that she had been able to manage was still so small that they were smashed together, with a bundle of magazines between them.

"Don't make me regret letting you bring those," Yamcha growled.

Meanwhile, Oolong (after being not-so-gently kicked by Eighteen) had transformed himself. With more mass than Pu'ar, he was able to manage a slightly larger shape that the family could stuff themselves into.

"Good thing you're all so small," Oolong grumbled.

Eighteen whacked him in the ceiling with her fist. "Watch who you're talking about!"

"Ouch! All right, all right," he grumbled. "You're all small except for Juuhachigou's _fat ass!"_

This time she hit him harder.

At that moment the canopy of the boat disintegrated in a shower of plastic shards, and water rushed in to fill it. The submersibles proved to be airtight, and began to float towards the surface.

"Four minutes, twenty seconds," Kuririn muttered, checking Eighteen's watch over her shoulder. The two of them were packed into the narrow space with her hips wedged into his lap, and Marron on her lap.

"Shut up! I'm nervous enough already!" Oolong yelled.

Eighteen blinked as a drop of moisture hit her in the forehead. "Yes, I can see that. You're sweating like a ... pig."

"That's really disgusting," Kuririn mumbled through a mouthful of Eighteen's hair. "Say, sweetie, could you please stop moving your head? You almost broke my nose that time."

"You don't have a nose."

"... oh, right."

 

* * *

 

"Gohan!"

The teenage demi-saiyajin struggled to his feet, bleeding from multiple wounds. In their first rush, one spider had pierced him through the thigh; another had broken one of his arms; another had opened a deep wound along his scalp. He glanced at Videl, blinking blood out of his eyes, and saw that he had managed to protect her; the only wound on her body, besides the broken arm, was a small cut on her cheek.

They had not managed to kill or even damage any of the spiders, and now the red lights encircled them again.

"I love you, Videl," Gohan said, not daring to look at her to see what the reaction to those words might be. But he couldn't die without having said it once.

"I love you too," Videl said softly. Gohan looked back at her, to see her smiling at him very gently.

They backed up until their backs were pressed against each other. The spiders hesitated, then, sensing the weakness of their prey (or completely indifferent either way) sprang at once.

Gohan and Videl --

\-- found themselves flying through the air, each of them gripped by the collar in one of Piccolo's powerful hands.

"Huh ... what ... huh ..." Videl gasped.

Piccolo landed some twenty feet away. He couldn't fly without ki, but he could still manage some pretty respectable jumps.

"Wow, Piccolo-san," Gohan breathed. "That was Vegeta-class timing." He looked up at his mentor. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Piccolo said, maintaining his balance only with effort and wishing that his strength would return more quickly from the last regeneration--because he suspected that he was going to need that particular skill again in the very near future. "Can you run?"

"I ... don't know." Gohan tried to put weight on his leg and it nearly buckled under him. He gasped with pain. "It's so frustrating ... I never realized how much I always relied on ki to augment my strength and stamina."

"You and the rest of us, kid." Piccolo looked over his shoulder. The spiders had taken a moment to figure out which direction their prey had gone, but now they were reorienting. "All right. Let's go."

He hooked an arm under Gohan's shoulders. Videl nodded to indicate that she could make it on her own, and they started running.

"Do you have a plan?" Videl gasped.

"Plan?" Piccolo glanced down at the two young people.

"Of course he's got a plan. This is Piccolo we're talking about here. He's always got a plan," Gohan said.

"A plan, sure." Piccolo tried desperately to think of something off the top of his head.

"Does that mean you have one or you don't?" Videl demanded skeptically.

"I--hold on a minute, kid."

Several spiders scrambled out to block their path. They swerved but realized that they were surrounded again. There was simply no way to outrun them now that they'd been discovered. The spiders were too fast, the three of them too tired.

"You don't have a plan, do you," Videl said, feeling a sense of deja vu as the three of them faced outward, Gohan held up by Piccolo. Dying alone with Gohan was sort of romantic, in a weird dark way, but dying with a giant green alien between them ... wasn't. "Damn it!" she cried. "I'm Mr. Satan's daughter! I'm not going to die like this!"

She had managed to keep the piece of deadwood that Gohan had given her, clutched tightly in her good hand, and she held it out in front of her as menacingly as possible.

There were at least twenty spiders around them.

Gohan raised his head. "Piccolo, get out of here. You have to find Dad. There's nothing you can do here except die."

"Everybody dies sometime, kid," Piccolo replied. "It's not so bad. You get used to it after it's happened a few times."

"I guess it wasn't really so bad the last time," Videl said with a shaky laugh. "It was peaceful and there were lots of flowers, and almost everyone I knew was there except for Daddy. Gohan, will you promise to look for me in the afterlife if I get there first?"

"I promise, Videl."

Piccolo rolled his eyes. Of the many things he didn't understand about humans, their weird mating customs topped the list.

Still, there were worse ways to die than to go out fighting, with Gohan by his side.

 

* * *

 

"What does the radar say?" Bulma asked Trunks.

The little boy squinted at it. "We should be real close now."

Bulma looked below them as miles of dark forest scrolled by under the aircraft, dotted with the red lights of the hunting spiders.

"Wh-where are you taking us? I thought we were going someplace safe?"

Bulma looked over her shoulder at their passengers. "We are. I promise. I just need to pick up somebody else first."

She'd started rescuing civilians on the edge of the forest. She hadn't planned to; there was no way that she could help even a tiny fraction of the population of the beleaguered Earth, and she had left Capsule Corp. with her heart deliberately hardened against the suffering on the ground. She'd been able to maintain this state of mind as they flew over the city, where the army had herded most of the population into a handful of temporary defense camps, and there were plenty of people to help and very little that she herself could do. But out here, the scattered houses and homesteads had no army to defend them. When they had flown over a mother struggling to protect her little children outside a small farmhouse, Trunks and Goten had popped open the aircraft's main door and almost fell to their death (forgetting they couldn't fly) so Bulma had dived down and rescued the woman, her children and her husband. They picked up a half-dozen other families in the same area, then flew back to drop them off at the nearest of the army's camps before continuing on into the forest. Bulma tried to avoid habitation, but even so, she'd already picked up an old couple and their granddaughter from their isolated house.

"Mom, look, there's a house light over there --" Trunks said, pointing. "We should go see if anybody needs help."

"We don't have time."

"Mom, they might be in trouble ..."

"No."

Bulma looked at him sternly, forcing herself to keep her face, and heart, hard. The boys only wanted to help. But they could wish back everyone who died, and right now it was much more important to collect the Earth's strong fighters and find a way to defeat the spiders in order to have the luxury of collecting dragon balls.

She didn't know how to explain that sort of decision to an eight-year-old. For right now, "because I said so" would have to do.

There were no spiders flying near them and she took the radar back from Trunks in order to try to fine-tune the readings. The large, anomalous ki that she'd detected earlier should be right under them, somewhere around here, but it had grown so low that she was now having trouble pinpointing it. No other ki's in the area were high enough to register above the background energy. Her heart twisted; she remembered that high Saiyajin ki, rising and then falling. There was no way to find that person now. She'd just have to hope that the person she was currently pursuing was Piccolo, not some hostile alien, and that he was with whoever had been hurt.

She also hoped she was in time.

 

* * *

 

Between the three of them, Piccolo, Gohan and Videl had managed to hold out surprisingly long, considering the fact that all three of them were tired and depleted, and Gohan was badly hurt. They'd escaped from the spiders twice more, once when Piccolo grabbed his younger companions and jumped up into the branches of a nearby tree, and the other time by fleeing into a waterfall, which baffled the spiders long enough to let them temporarily slip away. But now they were cornered again, backed up against a cliff face. Gohan could barely stand; Videl was holding him up, but she was exhausted herself, and shaky with shock from her broken arm. Though Piccolo was struggling not to show weakness in front of the two injured young people, he knew that he didn't have the strength to regenerate anymore.

Suddenly all three of them, and the surrounding spiders, were bathed in a searchlight. Dazed, dizzy, Gohan looked up, squinting against the glare, and he made out the shape of some kind of vehicle, with a door open in its side and leaning out of it--the familiar spiky-headed shape of--Goten?

It couldn't be. He had to be hallucinating.

"Damn those spiders!" Bulma muttered, causing the boys to burst into giggles at the swear word, but immediately they turned serious again, responding to the gravity of the situation. She held the vehicle steady about thirty feet off the ground: far too low for comfort, but too high to help the three small figures below them. "I don't dare go down to pick them up; the spiders will be all over us, and any minute now they'll come flying up to see --"

True to her word, several spiders had already taken off, launching themselves into the air to investigate the vehicle. "Hang on, Goten!" Bulma yelled to the boy crouched at the vehicle's open door, and brought them up quickly to a height of several hundred feet, went through some evasive maneuvers to shake off the spiders and started to descend again.

Bulma gritted her teeth. "Okay. We can't keep this up all day, and neither can they." She couldn't believe she was even considering what she was about to do, but she had no choice. "Trunks, have you ever fired a weapon before?"

Trunks shook his head. "Nuh-uh. I always used ki."

"I was afraid of that. What about you folks?" she said over her shoulder to the old couple.

"We kept a shotgun to keep th' dinosaurs outta the livestock," the old man said hesitantly.

"Good. You're drafted." Bulma handed the bazooka back to him. "Go over to the open door with Goten--he's the little black-haired boy. When I start to take us down low, fire one shot into the middle of the spiders, making sure not to get close to any humans--the blast radius on the explosions is pretty wide. Trunks! Get over there with Goten! You two, too," she added to the old woman and their little girl. "As soon as we're low enough, all of you try to grab them and pull them in. Do you all understand?"

They all nodded.

"Okay. Ready ... set ..." She put the vehicle into a steep dive. "Don't fire yet, old guy. Okay--now!"

The old man fired a bazooka shell over Goten's head. A moment later, fire blossomed in the clearing below them, scattering the spiders. The speeding aircraft rocketed over the grass, knocking more spiders out of the way. "Get ready to grab them!" Bulma screamed.

The three on the ground--she was pretty sure it was Gohan, Videl and Piccolo, though it was difficult to see them clearly--appeared to understand what she was doing and made a dash for the aircraft as Bulma slowed as much as she dared. Bulma had to keep her eyes on the cliff and the trees, trusting that the boys would do their part, trusting that sharp spider legs would not pierce her son's small body as he leaned out of the craft to help his best friend's brother ... Shaking her mind free of that line of thought, she kept her hands steady on the controls and pulled them up into a steep climb. Only a second or two had elapsed; it had all happened that quickly.

Bulma risked a quick glance over her shoulder to see what was happening. Wind screamed through the cabin of the craft, because the door was still open; she was thankful that she had short hair, because at least it couldn't whip into her eyes and make it impossible for her to see. A tangle of bodies was sprawled on the floor and she couldn't tell who was who. In the doorway, Trunks was leaning almost all the way out, with someone--Piccolo!--holding onto the boy's waist. "Hold on!" she heard Trunks yell.

"What's going on?" Bulma demanded. "Do we have everybody?"

The people on the floor of the craft started sitting up and sorting themselves out. Bulma did a quick head count: seven--the old couple, the girl, Goten, Gohan, Trunks and Piccolo.

Just as she realized who was missing, Bulma heard Trunks shout to her, "Mom! We gotta land! Videl's gonna fall!"

"Videl! Where is she?" Bulma cried.

Piccolo looked over his shoulder at her. The Namek was more bedraggled than she'd ever seen him, his usual cape and turban missing, and the rest of his clothes in tatters. "She almost didn't get on," he said. "She's holding onto the landing gear. One of her arms is broken, so she can't pull herself up or reach for us."

"But that means I can't land either," Bulma said, despairing.

Gohan pushed himself up to one elbow. His face was covered with blood. "Videl ..." he gasped.

"I know! I know!" Trunks cried. "Piccolo-san! Hold my ankles and lower me down and I'll grab Videl!"

"You won't reach. It's too far down," the Namek said.

Goten scampered over to them. "Then hold onto me, too, Trunks!"

Piccolo cast a glance at Bulma for affirmation. She was not only Trunks's mother, but in the absence of either of Goten's parents, a stand-in for them as well.

Bulma nodded.

Trunks grasped Goten's ankles, and Piccolo braced himself against the door of the craft. Bulma noticed that his body was trembling with fatigue, and wished she hadn't seen that, since her son's life was now in his green-skinned hands. The old couple helped steady him (he gave them a nervous glance when they first touched him, then steeled himself and looked away). Bulma wished she dared leave the controls and help, but the spiders were riled up now, and the air seemed to be filled with the creatures flying about. She had her hands full trying to avoid them without giving such a rough ride that she'd knock any of her passengers out the open door.

"What's happening back there!" she cried, unable to bear the suspense. Another quick backward look, and her heart started beating again: Trunks and Goten were helping a bedraggled, shaken Videl through the door, while Piccolo collapsed against the wall and closed his eyes.

"Shut the door, quickly!" Bulma said, haunted by visions of spider legs hooking through from outside, but the boys were already doing it.

With the door shut, Bulma pressurized the cabin and started climbing until they had left the spiders behind. Then she set the craft on a steady course for Capsule Corp. "Trunks, come here and watch the instrument panels. Yell at me if anything happens."

The boy nodded, obedient for once. Bulma got up and went back to see how everyone was.

Gohan and Videl were lying on the floor of the craft, with the old couple tending to their wounds. Gohan appeared to be unconscious, but Videl opened her eyes and smiled up at Bulma. Both of them were even more filthy and bedraggled than Piccolo, and bleeding as well.

Goten was sitting next to Gohan, crying, "Big brother!" in a heartrending voice. Bulma put an arm around him.

"Your brother's going to be all right, sweetie. Why don't you go help Trunks fly the plane."

Goten nodded and scampered off; like Trunks, he was unusually subdued and obedient after the events of the past few minutes. Bulma reassured herself that Gohan and Videl were in good hands, and then turned to Piccolo. The Namek was still sitting in the same position, leaning against the side of the aircraft. He was so exhausted that his legs were straight out, not folded; she couldn't ever recall seeing him sit that way.

"Piccolo?" Bulma said. "Are you all right?"

One antennae cocked in her direction, and he opened his eyes slightly. "I'm trying to meditate. I'll be all right once I recover the energy I've lost."

"Oh. Well ... okay," Bulma said. She stood for a moment looking down at him. She'd been afraid of Piccolo for a long time, and then intimidated by him; it was odd to see him slumped against the wall, as ragged and exhausted as any human being, looking almost helpless.

His antennae quivered and after a moment his eyes cracked open again. "You still there?"

"Yes," Bulma said. "I just wanted to say ... thanks for helping the kids."

Piccolo grunted and closed his eyes.

 _Well, I guess I still don't LIKE him all that much,_ Bulma mused, going to take the controls back from the boys. _But he's a good person to have around in a crisis._


	9. New Hope

"Thirty seconds until you have to transform," Kuririn reported, looking at Eighteen's watch.

"Would you shut up?!" Oolong yelled.

Suddenly the transformed shapeshifter and his passengers popped to the surface of the ocean. It was still almost as dark, for the night was moonless and only the stars lit the surface of the waves, but at least they were in the air again. "Thank Kami," Oolong groaned. _"Now get out!"_

Kuririn and Eighteen, with Marron tucked under her arm, scrambled out hastily into the lukewarm water, and just in time too, as Oolong popped back to his usual shape and started treading water with a massive sigh of relief.

"I hope you realize that you'll owe me for the rest of my life for that daring rescue," Oolong informed them between grateful gasps for air. "Daring rescue! ha! Let's see Son Goku and the rest of the Super Saiyajin Brigade top this one!"

"What could we owe you that you don't already get?" Eighteen demanded, lifting Marron onto her back so that the girl would be out of the water while she easily kept herself afloat with one arm. "You never cook, you never clean, you never pay for a single meal. You spend all your time reading that old pervert's pornography."

"... say, where is he?" Kuririn asked, looking around. "And Yamcha?"

They got their answer a few moments later, as Pu'ar popped to the surface and a door opened in her side, discharging Master Roshi and Yamcha into the water. Pu'ar transformed back to her normal shape and levitated above the two swimming humans. "Yamcha-sama, are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Pu'ar. Though I'd be better if I hadn't just had to endure ten minutes of YOU moaning about losing your collection," he added to the hermit.

"My precious girls ..." Roshi moaned, treading water with one arm so that he could keep the handful of magazines that he'd managed to salvage out of the water.

"Honestly ..."

"Hey, keep it down, you guys," Kuririn warned. "There might be spiders around, and we don't know if they can hear us or not."

They all hushed and looked about. There was no sign of any ominous red lights on their own level, but they could all see the glimmers in the night sky, like a swarm of sparks.

"How many of them _are_ there?" Yamcha breathed, staring up into the sky.

"I think that if we don't find some dry land, we won't have to worry about getting killed by spiders, because we'll drown," Oolong panted.

"Oh, you can't possibly be that out of shape," Eighteen snorted. "You've only been treading water for a few minutes. If you have breath to talk, you have breath to swim."

The pig glared at her.

"Should I change into a boat, Yamcha-sama?" Pu'ar asked.

Yamcha looked up at his best friend floating above his head. "Can you hold all of us without hurting yourself?"

"It's not hard to be a boat," Pu'ar said. "The water is supporting your weight, not me. We used to practice this in the swimming pool at shapeshifter school." She looked down at Oolong. "Of course that was after you--"

"--decided to choose a different career," the pig finished for her.

"That's not how I remember it." Pu'ar floated down to the water's surface and suddenly there was a small, graceful blue canoe bobbing on the waves stirred up by the humans' splashing.

"Uh ... that's good for just Yamcha, but you're going to have to make yourself wider for the rest of us," Kuririn said.

Pu'ar contemplated and then expanded into a sort of cross between a boat and a raft--wide and flat, but with sides. "How's this?" she chirped.

"Pu'ar, as usual, you look wonderful," Yamcha said, climbing over the side.

The rest of them scrambled on with varying degrees of difficulty, and sat down. The Pu'ar-boat turned out to be oddly flexible for a boat, more akin to the shifting surface of a rubber raft, and it was slightly warm to the touch. Pu'ar floated low in the waves, and occasionally water slopped over the side; they had to scoop it out with their hands.

"Are you going to be able to maintain this?" Yamcha asked the boat.

"Don't worry about me, Yamcha-sama," said Pu'ar's voice. "Like I said, all I have to do is float; the water does the rest. It's like if you relaxed and floated with someone on your chest. As long as you are naturally buoyant enough that you don't sink under the water, it's not a problem to have someone sitting on you. And this form floats very well."

Kuririn crouched in the stern of the boat; he noticed in passing that it had a small tail, but as strange as this day had gotten, he wasn't particularly disturbed by it. He looked up at the red flickers darting about above them. "I wonder what in the world these things want from us."

"I do too," Eighteen agreed, and he glanced over to see her cuddling Marron, trying to comfort the wet and unhappy little girl. "They attack, but to what purpose?"

"All they would say was, _Humans, exterminate them,"_ Kuririn said. "Maybe that is their purpose."

"To destroy humankind?"

"Yeah, why not? Every alien we meet seems to have either heard of Goku, I mean 'Kakarrot', or the Earth, and none of them mean us anything but harm." He sighed heavily. "Why can't we meet some nice aliens for once. I mean, the Nameks were nice. They were very nice. Until Freeza and Vegeta killed them all ... I guess that did work out okay in the end, though."

"Here, have a magazine," Roshi said, shoving one into his hands. "Takes your mind off your troubles. Always works for me."

"Keep your hentai pictures away from my husband!" Eighteen thrust it back at him.

"You're right," he said, grinning at her and reaching out one hand towards her chest. "The real thing is much nicer--OOOOFFFF!"

The boat tilted and Yamcha and Kuririn hastily started bailing out water as it slopped around their ankles. "Sweetheart ... temper ..." Kuririn mumbled.

"Ouch ..." the hermit mumbled, rubbing his bruises. "It was so worth it, though ..."

Kuririn and Yamcha looked at each other. "Gonna be a long night," they agreed.

 

* * *

 

After dropping off the old couple and their granddaughter at the nearest army camp, Bulma headed back to Capsule Corp. with her passengers. "How is Gohan?" she asked over her shoulder.

Videl was sitting up and tending to her boyfriend. "We really need to get him some medical attention, fast."

Bulma wondered if she should have stayed at the army post and had them treat Gohan's injuries. But she had much better facilities at her lab, as well as having become very proficient in Saiyajin physiology and health during ten years of living with a Saiyajin who was constantly injuring himself.

Speaking of Vegeta ... she wondered what he was doing right now. Now that they'd found Gohan, the other two Saiyajin ki readings had to be Goku and Vegeta, so they were still alive and healthy somewhere. Everything would still be all right ...

"Uh, Mom ..." Trunks said.

"Uh-oh," Goten mumbled.

Bulma looked at her screens, and stifled a curse. They were beginning their descent to Capsule Corp.--and the entire building was completely covered with spiders. Spiders in the yard, spiders on the roof. The landing pad was thick with them.

"Stupid things," Bulma muttered. She'd had a long night and she was in no mood to deal with this sort of crap. "Trunks, open the door."

Trunks did, and then saw that his mother was resting the bazooka on her shoulder, aiming it over his head. "Mom, no! You'll blow up our home!"

"Oh, sh-- I mean, rats. You're right." She lowered the gun and looked down in dismay at the spiders swarming over the roof of Capsule Corp. "How are we going to land?" she cried, frustrated, looking back at Gohan. They had to get him some medical attention soon.

"We'll get rid of them for you, Mom!" Trunks cried. "Come on, Goten! Let's fuse!"

"Hey, wait --" Bulma started

"FU --"

"Wait a minute, you're forgetting you can't --"

"-- SION --"

"You don't have any ki!" Bulma yelled at them. "It won't work!"

"--HAAAAAA!!! ... oh wait, Mom's ri--"

A flash of light--dimmer than normal, but still startling under the circumstances--lit up the plane. Bulma covered her eyes and then stared in shock at an equally astounded Gotenks.

"What the--it worked," Bulma gasped.

"Woah," Gotenks said, looking down at his hands. "How'd that happen?"

Bulma's mind worked over the problem as she circled the plane above Capsule Corp. "It must be sort of like Piccolo's regeneration," she said finally. "Once you learn the technique, it takes little enough ki that you can do it even without being at your usual power level. Or maybe it's a different application of ki than usual, or ... something." She always got onto shaky mental ground when she ventured away from strict scientific facts and into those strange, pseudo-scientific gray areas where her life seemed bound to push her. Goku or Vegeta would probably know for sure.

Gotenks, meanwhile, held his hands up in front of him. "Wow, I'm so much more powerful now than I was before!" he cried in his blended voice. "Hey, Mom, look at this!"

Bulma looked, and saw a small ball of ki floating between his hands. She gasped, "You can use your energy now?"

Piccolo opened his eyes, startled out of his meditation by Gotenks's sudden surge of ki.

"ALL RIIIIIIIIGHT!" the fused boy yelled. "Look out, spiders, here I come!"

He jumped out the open door of the aircraft and promptly plummeted twenty feet to the roof of the building.

"Trunks!" Bulma shrieked. "Goten!"

"Apparently they still can't fly," Piccolo said, sticking his head out the door.

The boy was getting up, shaking his head. The spiders had been surprised by his sudden appearance, but now they were encircling him.

"I don't care about the property damage!" Bulma snarled, readying the bazooka. "If those monsters try to hurt my son, I'll blow them to smithereens."

"Along with Trunks and Goten," Piccolo reminded her.

"DAAAAAAMN IT!" Bulma yelled at the ceiling. "There's got to be something I can do!"

Gotenks, however, seemed to be holding his own against the spiders. Fusing had definitely increased the boys' energy by quite a large margin. With kicks and punches, Gotenks slowly cleared the roof. He could summon small balls of ki, but wasn't able to do much more than just dazzle the spiders' sensors; he mainly had to rely on his physical strength.

When most of the spiders had been knocked off the roof, Bulma lowered the aircraft. Her passengers were ready without having to be told; Piccolo had an arm around Gohan, supporting him, and Videl crouched on Gohan's other side, ready to jump. At Bulma's shout, they all leaped out and she converted the plane back into its capsule form. The group dashed for the door, rejoining Gotenks along the way, and Bulma punched the code into the door.

They didn't dare slow down until they reached the lab, since they already knew that the spiders could get into the house. They did meet two spiders on the way, but Gotenks, with his newly improved strength and speed, knocked them away with a double jump-kick. Once they were safe inside the lab, Bulma leaned against the door for a moment, her legs sagging--then she grabbed Gotenks and hugged the embarrassed boy while he tried to free himself.

"That was beautiful! That was wonderful! I have the smartest, bravest, most powerful son in the world! Trunks, you're amazing!"

Gotenks blushed at the praise, but he protested, "Hey, Mom, I'm Goten too."

"You're wonderful too, Goten." Bulma kissed Gotenks on the head and let him go, turning to Gohan, who had passed out completely.

Bulma's parents appeared out of the depths of the lab, and there was a quick flurry of hugs and greetings before the group hustled Gohan off to the medical room.

"How has it been going here?" Bulma asked her father as they hooked up the often-used IV setup.

"I think I'm making some progress. It would help if I had an actual spider to examine."

"I can get one!" Gotenks offered.

"No, wait, you'll get hurt --" Bulma began, but then she remembered the boy on the roof of the building, kicking off spiders left and right, and her heart swelled with maternal pride. "Well, be very careful and come back quickly," she said.

Gotenks grinned. "Thanks Mom!" He dashed out.

Dr. Briefs snapped his fingers. "Oh, I almost forget. We did have some visitors while you were gone."

"Visitors?"

"Yes. You'll never guess who was here ..."

 

* * *

 

A little earlier ...

Kinto'un plunged like a rock, with its three riders clinging to each other in mortal terror. About two hundred feet up from the ground, it leveled off jarringly.

There was a moment of silence.

"What ... happened?" Vegeta asked when he could breathe again.

"Uh ... I don't know. That never happened before," Goku said sheepishly.

Vegeta reminded himself that if he threw Goku off the cloud, he'd fall too. Besides, he would have had to pry his fingers free of Goku's arms first. He was gripping Goku's forearms hard enough to leave bruises.

"Probably it's just that the atmosphere up there is too thin to support all of our weight," Goku mused. "I've never flown that high with passengers." He shook himself, and grinned at the other two, the pallor fading from his face. "Well ... let's go!"

"I'm glad I'm a god," Kaiobito mumbled.

"Why's that?"

"No bladder."

Vegeta sighed and decided that ignoring him was probably the best strategy. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to do the same with Goku, since he was currently in control of their transportation, as well as face-to-face with the prince. "Where are you taking us, Kakarrot?" he asked the other Saiyajin.

"I'm not really sure ..."

Vegeta gritted his teeth.

"We both need to go home and check on our families," Goku decided. "After that ... we'll go see about this spaceship. I do have senzu beans, too."

"You do?"

Goku gestured to a brown bag tucked into his belt, as well as he could without knocking anybody off the cloud. "I asked Karin for the rest of his current crop."

"How many?"

"Four."

"That's not very many, Kakarrot."

"It's the wrong time of year."

"You'd think with you bunch around, he would have put in an entire field of senzu by now," Kaiobito said.

Kinto'un sped through the dark sky. They passed hundreds of spiders, but they were by and gone before the creatures could even react.

"One good Final Flash ..." Vegeta growled, shaking in fury.

"... or a Kamehameha ..." Goku murmured.

"... and they'd be, as the humans say, stationary waterfowl. Instead, we're forced to hide and tremble like children."

"Sitting ducks, Vegeta."

"What did you call me?"

"No, the human expression. It's sitting ducks, not sta--"

"I don't care, Kakarrot. On Vegeta-sei we would have said 'like a hibernating kekkoddiku' but that's neither here nor there."

"What is a ... what you said?"

"A small burrowing animal, not unlike your rodents. Extinct of course, since the planet no longer exists. We'd hunt and eat them in the Palace gardens when I was a kid." He stopped speaking and stared off at the horizon moodily.

Goku studied the prince's sharp profile. Vegeta almost never spoke of the vanished planet. Sometimes Goku wanted desperately to know more--to hear about his homeworld, the world he'd never had a chance to know--and it frustrated him that the only information about Vegeta-sei that still existed in the galaxy was locked within the mind of someone who refused to share it. But there was no forcing Vegeta to talk if he didn't want to, and he didn't often want to. Goku quietly filed away one more little piece of information about his world ... and its prince.

As fast as a Saiyajin could have flown, the cloud covered the distance between the tower and the forest where the Sons lived. As they flew, Kaiobito gasped suddenly and leaned forward to shout in Goku's ear above the wind. "Look up there!"

Both Saiyajins tilted their heads back, becoming aware of the great mass floating in the night sky, a dark shape blotting out the stars. As they flew closer, slowly they could make out tiny lights on its bulk, like the lights of a distant city. Still closer, it hardly seemed to have grown at all, and they began to realize how far away the thing truly was, and therefore how huge it must be.

"So that's the ship," Goku breathed.

"It's the size of a city," Vegeta said softly, looking up at it. "The Saiyajin had many large ships, and so did Freeza, but I've still never seen one so huge."

"I don't understand why it hasn't done anything yet," Kaiobito said. "It's just sitting there ... waiting for something?"

"Perhaps they're waiting for the spiders to cause chaos on the Earth before they attack," Vegeta suggested. "Still, any race who are capable of building a ship that size must possess formidable weapons as well. The spiders, numerous as they are, hardly qualify."

Goku turned his head to look at the god. "Have you ever heard of a race of people who can create such things?"

Kaiobito shook his head. "But it's a huge universe, Goku-san. I have learned of many new things since I met you, such as the existance of the dragonballs. As hard as I try to keep track of everything, I don't monitor every world or every intelligent race."

The ship had grown noticeably larger, but still looked very far away, when they reached the part of the forest where the Sons lived. Goku brought the cloud down to land in front of his house. There were no spiders visible at the moment.

"Chi-Chi!" Goku yelled as they all stepped off the cloud. "Gohan! Goten!"

"Have you heard of stealth, Kakarrot?" Vegeta demanded.

But Goku was too worried to care. He tested the door of his house, found it locked, and promptly pulled it off its hinges and hurtled it over his shoulder-- _Chi-Chi is going to kill me when she sees that,_ he thought--and ran inside. The interior of the house was dark. He paused in the middle of the living room, straining his senses for any signs of either his family, or a metal nightmare crouching in the shadows.

The other two followed him with more caution. Vegeta had the presence of mind to flip on the light switch, but nothing happened; despite their isolated location, the Sons did get their power from the nearest village, and it wasn't too surprising that it was out at the moment.

"I can't sense anything in here," Kaiobito said softly.

Vegeta turned to glare at him in the dark. "Can you sense anything at all?"

"I, uh ..." The god hesitated, casting out his senses. "Now that you mention it, no."

Vegeta hmphed. _Useless idiot._

Goku climbed the stairs to the second floor, calling Chi-Chi's name softly. There was no response. In a few minutes he'd searched the entire house. No one was home.

Goku ran his hand over his face. "I ... hope they're all right, wherever they are."

"You know Chi-Chi," Vegeta retorted, leaning against the doorframe with folded arms and keeping an eye on the dark forest outside. "I doubt if any spider would be insane enough to try to fight that woman, and even if it did, it wouldn't stand a chance." _I'm trying to cheer up KAKARROT,_ he groaned mentally. "Besides," he added, struck by a thought. "Most likely they're all over at the onna's place. I know your youngest was going to be spending the night with my brat. Once all hell started breaking loose on Earth, the rest of your family may have gone there to join them."

Goku grinned, like the sun breaking through clouds. "You're probably right. We'll go there."

 _About time. We should have gone there first._ Of course Capsule Corp. would be a good base of operations, centrally located compared to this isolated place. They also needed to see if that woman and her father had come up with any useful way of combating the spiders. His desire to go to Capsule Corp. had absolutely nothing to do with checking on the woman and the brat. Naturally not.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, at sea ...

The Pu'ar-boat drifted on the waves. They'd tried having Oolong turn into an oar, once his transforming ability recharged, but there wasn't a whole lot you could do with an oar that only stayed oar-shaped for five minutes (especially when it constantly whined and refused to allow its head to be dunked in the water), and besides, they had no idea which way to go.

"That way's north," Yamcha said, looking up at the sky, and pointing across the dark water. "I used to navigate by the stars in the desert."

"It's all well and good to know where north is, but not much help when we don't know where we are relative to anything else," Kuririn said, sitting on one of Pu'ar's gunwales and trailing his hand in the water.

"We'll have better luck if we go in a straight line that if we drift randomly," Yamcha pointed out. "We're bound to encounter something eventually if we just keep going. At least, that's true on land."

"I'm hungry, Mommy," Marron whimpered, snuggling against Eighteen's shoulder.

"Shh!" They all fell silent, even the child, as a pair of hunting spiders flew over at a height of several hundred feet. It was obvious that they had not been spotted, and the spiders flew on without changing course. They still hadn't figured out what sort of sensory apparatus the spiders had, but it didn't seem to involve ki-sensing, because the tiny boat on the great dark ocean appeared to be invisible to them.

After the spiders' red lights had vanished away to the west, there was a long, nervous silence before Yamcha spoke again "This isn't really a bad place to be stranded."

"In what universe?" Kuririn demanded.

"Compared to the desert, I mean," Yamcha said--still in "wilderness survival" mode. "We can fish for food, and we have all the water we could want as soon as we build a rudimentary distilling apparatus. I can do it easily. All I need is a plastic jug, about a gallon or so --"

"-- which unfortunately we don't have," Kuririn pointed out.

"She's got nice jugs," Master Roshi said, oogling Eighteen's chest.

She gave him a resigned glare. "The only reason I'm not beating you to a pulp is because my daughter has fallen asleep and I don't want to wake her up."

"Oolong can turn into a jug," Yamcha mused out loud.

"In your dreams," the pig snapped. "Look, Grizzly Adams, you may be able to get by just fine in the mountains with nothing more than a roll of duct tape and your left sneaker, but normal people require a little more for the rudiments of survival. Such as a television and a well-stocked refrigerator."

"I imagine Oolong would be perfectly happy stranded at sea as long as he had a big-screen TV and a cooler full of beer," Kuririn said, grinning at the image.

"Damn straight," the pig muttered, folding his arms and lying back against the side of the boat. "Wait, you forgot the hot chicks."

"Hey, is that a spider up there?" Yamcha said. "It looks ... different from the others."

They all fell silent and looked. This light was white, and moving rapidly in a straight line.

"No, I think it's some kind of plane," Master Roshi said.

Yamcha stood up in the boat, spreading his legs to keep his balance. "Hey, all we have to do is get their attention and we'll be saved!"

"What if they're the enemy?" Eighteen inquired.

"What enemy? All we've seen so far have been mechanical spiders."

"Don't you think something has to be directing them?"

"Even if whoever's flying that plane is hostile, we'd stand a better chance against them than staying down here," Kuririn said. "Once the sun comes up, every spider for miles around is going to be able to see us, and there's nowhere to hide out here. We won't last minutes."

"The boy's right," Master Roshi said, tilting his head back as the white light sped along. In a few moments it would be out of sight.

"There's no way they can see us, down here in the dark," Kuririn cried, standing up in the boat as Yamcha had done.

Yamcha turned to Oolong. "Quick. Turn into a flashlight."

"Every time you people get in trouble. It never fails," the pig grumbled, transforming and falling with a plonk onto Pu'ar's gunwale, where Yamcha grabbed him before he could teeter and fall into the sea. "Do you ever try to solve your own problems? No, it's _where's the shapeshifter, let's call the shapeshifter ..."_

"What do you mean, we don't solve our own problems?" Kuririn demanded, turning to glare at the flashlight, which switched itself on so that it could glare back. "Where were you when we were fighting Nappa and Vegeta? Cell? The androids? (Sorry, dear.) Majin Buu?"

"Having enough sense to not get myself in trouble in the first place," Oolong grumbled. He blinked his beam experimentally. "What's SOS? Two long, one short, one l--"

"Three short, three long, three short," Yamcha said, pointing him at the sky.

"Oh, you would know that," Oolong grumbled, flashing on and off. "I imagine it came in handy while you were robbing people."

"Is it just me or have you been more disagreeable than usual lately?"

"I suppose getting attacked and driven from your home can have that effect on a person," Kuririn offered charitably from the other end of Pu'ar.

"No, he's always been that way," Eighteen said.

At first it seemed that the plane hadn't seen them, but then they saw the small white light make a wide circle over the ocean and start back towards them.

"Well, I guess this is the point where it wipes us all out with one shot from its giant laser," Oolong said, reverting to his usual shape and dropping to the bottom of the boat when Yamcha let go of him. "Or beams us up and conducts horrifying sexual experiments on us."

Master Roshi perked up. "Will buxom young women be involved?"

"We're going to have to stop letting you watch the late late movie," Kuririn snapped at Oolong, moving closer to Eighteen, who was sitting up with the sleeping Marron in her lap and watching the light approach.

The craft settled into a hovering position above them. "It's not an alien's plane!" Kuririn said, pointing out the Capsule Corp. logo on the side.

"It could still be robbers or something like that," Yamcha said as the aircraft began to descend.

"Takes one to know one," Oolong muttered.

"Uh ... guys ..." Kuririn said, as the plane continued to descend, right on top of them. "I think ... it looks like ... it's landing ... on _us_ ..."

Apparently the pilot had realized the same thing, because the plane made some wobbly, inexpert course corrections, one of which involved dipping its bottom half into the sea before it finally managed to come to a stationary hover near the boat. Waves stirred up by the aircraft rocked Pu'ar, and water slopped over her gunwales.

"What moron is flying that thing?" Yamcha demanded, trying to keep his footing.

The door in the side of the vehicle opened, and someone leaned out, long hair flying in the wind. "Keep it steady now, Daddy!" she yelled over her shoulder, then turned around and looked at them all.

The jaws of everyone in the boat dropped to their shoes.

"Chi-Chi?" Kuririn gasped.

"Yes, don't just stand there, get into the plane, everybody," Chi-Chi urged, climbing down onto the plane's landing gear and extending a hand to the stunned group in the boat.

Eighteen recovered first and leaned out to hand Marron to Chi-Chi, who placed the girl inside the door of the plane. Kuririn was next, assisted by his wife, and then Master Roshi and Oolong. Eighteen climbed onto the landing gear next to Chi-Chi and looked back at Yamcha. "Are you coming?"

"Yes, just a minute." He laid a hand on the boat's gunwale. "Pu'ar?" Yamcha said, shaking her gently. "You need to change back now. We can't get you into the plane in boat form. Pu'ar?"

The boat shuddered and suddenly it was a small, sodden ball of blue fur, and Yamcha was treading water. Pu'ar started to sink; he scooped her up with one hand, while Chi-Chi and Eighteen hauled him into the plane, then climbed in after him. Eighteen closed the door.

The interior of the plane was utilitarian but new-looking. Gyu-mao, at the controls, looked over his shoulder and gave them all a cheerful wave.

"Pu'ar?" Yamcha said, cradling her next to his chest. Pu'ar was shivering and limp. "Pu'ar, can you hear me? Speak to me please ... Damn it, I think she's got hypothermia. I didn't even think about what she was going through, being in the water all that time ..."

Chi-Chi took off a scarf and handed it to him. "Here, dry her off. You can put her on one of the ship's radiator vents until she gets warm. I'll make some tea. You all look like you could use it."

"You have tea stuff in here?" Kuririn asked.

"That surprises you for some reason?" Master Roshi said, oogling Chi-Chi's rear end as she bent over a small hot plate in the corner.

"What in the world are you guys doing here, anyway?" Yamcha asked as he gently dried off Pu'ar's fur. "I didn't even know you had a plane."

"It was a gift from Bulma, years ago, though Father's hardly ever used it," Chi-Chi said, pouring water for the tea. "With the children and Goku-san gone for the day, I was visiting Father when those ... those ..." Thinking about the spiders, she squeezed a teacup so hard that it exploded in her hand.

"Our castle is fairly impervious to these creatures," Gyu-mao explained. "My daughter and I have been rescuing villagers and taking them inside. When we'd made sure the surrounding towns were safe, we went looking for Son Goku and the grandkids. There was no one at Chi-Chi's house, and when we went by Capsule Corp., the only people there were Bulma's parents. They said Bulma and the boys were out looking for survivors."

"So we came down here, hoping we'd run into Bulma with my little Goten," Chi-Chi said. "Or that Gohan or Goku-san would be with you." Tears filled her eyes. "Poor Gohan, out there all alone. I told you we didn't have time to waste, Daddy."

"And as I told _you,_ I'm sure Son Goku and Gohan are fine. Probably out saving the world even as we speak. And Goten's safe with Bulma."

"Safe! What's that woman doing, taking my son with her? She should have left him at Capsule Corp.--he'd be much safer there. And where is Goku, anyway?"

"That's a good question, actually," Kuririn said. "You guys haven't seen him, huh?"

"The last time I saw him, he was going out to spar with Vegeta this morning," Chi-Chi said, making the tea with sharp, choppy motions of her hands. Everyone was watching carefully to make sure that, in her agitated state, she didn't accidentally pour diesel into it or something equally dangerous.

Yamcha looked up from ministering to Pu'ar. "Well, like the Ox King said ... if I know Goku, he's probably out kicking some spider butts even as we speak."

 

* * *

 

Several stories in the air above Capsule Corp., Kinto'un hovered while its passengers stared down at the spiders swarming all over the building and tried to formulate a plan for getting in.

"There might not be anyone home," Goku said. This part of the city had been evacuated, which was why the spiders were freely overrunning it.

Vegeta shook his head. "If I know that Onna of mine, she'll be in her lab. I don't think an army of spiders could pry her out. And even if she's gone, her idiot parents will be there; those fools didn't even leave when Buu was destroying the planet. And they should know where everyone else went."

"So all we have to do is get in --"

Goku's musings were interrupted by a cry from below. "Hey, you dumb spiders, come and get me! Nyaaaahhhh!"

The three looked down, startled, to see a young boy running across the lawn with at least ten spiders chasing him.

"Oh, no!" Goku gasped. "Kinto'un, quick!"

"GAH!" Kaiobito yelled, almost losing his grip on Goku as the cloud plunged towards the ground. Vegeta hung on grimly in silence. Goku reached out and grabbed the boy by the collar, swooping back into the air. Kinto'un rose rather sluggishly; the cloud's abilities were being taxed to the limits with three adult passengers and one child.

"Hey!" the boy screamed, struggling in Goku's grasp. "You stupid jerk! They're getting away! What are you trying to do --" He trailed off, staring at Goku and Vegeta in wide-eyed amazement. "Dad?" he said. "Papa?"

"Gotenks?" Vegeta said in disbelief.

"You're fused!" Goku exclaimed. "How'd you do it, son?"

Gotenks shrugged. "I dunno. I just tried and it worked. Now let me go. I'm trying to catch a spider for Mom."

"Why does Chi-Chi want a spider?"

"I think he means Bulma, Kakarrot." Vegeta turned his attention on Gotenks. "Is Bulma here, boy?"

"Yep, Mom's here, but Mother's not. Big brother's here too. Now let me go!"

Goku and Vegeta both had to sort that out for a second or two. "Gohan!" Goku cried happily. "... but not Chi-Chi."

"Grandma told me that she was here for a few minutes, but she left again to find us, so I dunno where she is now."

"Tell me, son," Vegeta said, getting Gotenks's attention. "You said you were catching a spider. Can you fight them, in this form?"

"Yeah!" the boy enthused, punching the air cheerfully. "I kick 'em and they just knock right down."

"Hey, Vegeta --"

"Shut up, Kakarrot."

"Vegeta, if they can fuse, maybe --"

"I said shut up, Kakarrot."

"Come on, Dad, put me down," Gotenks whined. "I almost had one before you came along and messed everything up."

"Oh, right," Goku laughed. "Can you fly?"

"No," Gotenks said, wincing from remembered pain.

"We'll set you down, then. Kinto'un --"

Kaiobito looked down at the seething mass of spiders below them. "You're not actually going to send your son into _that?"_

"Why not?" Goku said. "They'll be all right, and I'll be there to pick them up if anything happens."

He descended and dropped the boy into a spider-free spot on the Briefs' front lawn. The two Saiyajins and the god watched in amazement as Gotenks waded fearlessly into the mass of spiders. A skirmish ensued, and when the dust settled, Gotenks was carrying a de-limbed spider body under his arm like a football, with several disembodied legs clutched in his other hand.

"Dad! Papa!" he yelled up at the observers, dodging a striking spider. "Pick me up and drop me on the roof, couldja?"

"That's my boy!" Goku said proudly, descending with the cloud.

"... not JUST yours," Vegeta snapped.

They airlifted Gotenks to the landing pad on the roof, where he cleared off the spiders so they could land. "Hey, Dad, Papa, why aren't you fighting?"

"Because we ca--" Goku began.

"Stuff a sock in it, Kakarrot. Because you were doing well enough on your own, so we thought we'd give you the pleasure of finishing."

"Oh!" Gotenks said happily. He opened the door for them.

"Vegeta, that's ... " Goku said.

"Lying through his teeth," Kaiobito mumbled.

They entered Capsule Corp., and Gotenks led them to the lab. "Hey, Mom! I got your spider! And I found Papa and Dad, too!"

"You did what?" Bulma turned around from her worktable, and her face lit up like a ray of sunshine when she saw the two Saiyajins. "Vegeta! Son-kun!"

"Onna," Vegeta said by way of greeting.

"What happened? Are you hurt?" Bulma hurried over to them, looking at their ragged, bloodstained clothes.

"We were. We've been to see Karin, and we got senzu." Goku touched the small brown bag at his belt.

"Oh, that's wonderful! Gohan can use those."

"Gohan? Is he hurt?"

"Yes, he is ... but he'll be all right now. He'll be so glad to see you; he's been very worried about you. He's back there with Videl and Piccolo. Trun--Gotenks, please show Son-kun where Gohan is."

As Goku hurried past her, Bulma strode up to Vegeta. "And as for you ... where have you been and why didn't you call to let me know you were all right?"

"I've been a bit busy, woman."

She looked down at his destroyed clothes. "I can see that. You need a shower, too. Say, Son-kun said you'd been to Karin's; does that mean you two can still fly?"

Vegeta shook his head, his mouth set in a hard line. "We have no ability to use our ki. I assume it's the same elsewhere."

Bulma nodded. "Gohan, Videl, and Piccolo all have the same problem. Trunks and Goten can use it a little bit when they're fused, but not much. So how did you get to Karin's Tower?"

Vegeta angled his head at the person standing behind him. Bulma looked curiously around him. "Say, you're ... I remember seeing you at the tournament. Son-kun and Vegeta have told me about you. You're God, right?"

Kaiobito grinned sheepishly. "Most people are a little more intimidated."

"I've already met the Kami-sama of Earth years ago--and Lord Enma, and several others whose names I forget, while I was dead." Bulma smiled and held out her hand. "Would you like to come in and sit down? I can't really offer you anything ... I don't even know if you eat."

"Hey, what about me?" Vegeta demanded. "Your mate?"

"Keep your pants on, your highness. No, on second thought, go take them off and take a shower. Kaio-sama, if you could please excuse me for just a minute?"

She ran quickly to Vegeta and put her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder. "I'm very glad you're all right," she whispered.

"Let go, woman. You're embarrassing me." Vegeta touched his forehead lightly against hers--aware that physical gestures of affection pleased her, despite how mortally humiliating he found them, he'd been making an effort ever since losing her to Majin Buu--and then headed off to the lab's bathroom.

"I'll have Gotenks go get you some clean clothes!" Bulma called after him.

Before stopping into the bathroom, Vegeta took a quick look into the medical room. Gohan was sitting on the edge of his bed, flexing his newly healed body, while Goku tried to convince a ragged, bandaged Videl to take a senzu.

Videl shook her head. "No, save it, please. You may need it while you're fighting, and there's little I can do to help even when I'm healthy."

Goku smiled at her and firmly shoved the seed into her hand. "Take it. I can see that you're hurt. Your pain isn't any less important than ours."

"I shouldn't ..." Videl protested, wavering.

"Go ahead."

She smiled back at him and swallowed it.

"You shouldn't have done that, Kakarrot. We may need that," Vegeta growled, but so softly that neither of them could hear him. He had seen that the girl was in pain, too. _Stupid Kakarrot and his stupid softness, infecting me._

But now they had only two senzu beans, and a spaceship the size of a city floating overhead, biding its time until some unknown signal--and they were all still powerless against whatever might come out of it.


	10. The Big Plan

When Vegeta stepped out of the shower, he walked out into a scene of cheerful reunions. Chi-Chi and her refugees had rendesvoused with everyone else, and now the lab was filled with old friends (or, as Vegeta mentally tagged them, halfwit bakas) renewing their acquaintance and sharing stories of spiders they'd escaped, attacked or killed.

He searched for Bulma among the crowd of idiots, but before he could find her, he was assaulted by Goku.

"Hey, Vegeta! It looks like we've got a chance now, huh? The gang's back together!" Goku enthused, throwing his arm around Vegeta's shoulders. Vegeta glared at him.

"What a thrill, Kakarrot."

"Yeah, isn't it?" Goku agreed, oblivious to the sarcasm. "Just about everybody's here except Tien and Chaotzu, and Bulma's ki detector can probably find them, too."

"Speaking of Bul--"

"And the shapeshifters can still change shape, which is another advantage we've got, and fusion works, which is really fantastic though I can't quite figure out how it's possible --"

"Yes, but Bul--"

"And we've got Kaiobito on our side, and Dr. Briefs says he thinks he can figure out how to neutralize the spiders; I mean, we can't lose, Vegeta! It looks like we've finally--"

"Kakarrot!" Vegeta yelled in his face. "Where is my mate?" he inquired in a more neutral tone.

"Jeez, Vegeta, you don't have to yell," Goku said. "She's over there with her father." He pointed.

Vegeta managed to shake himself free of Goku's friendly armlock and pushed his way through the throng (earning a deathglare from Eighteen when he elbowed her out of the way) to where Bulma, Dr. Briefs, and a few others, including Kaiobito, were clustered around a weird-looking contraption.

"-- but I think there's a possibility the low-frequency radiation could interfere with the transmitter unless you use more shielding," Bulma was saying.

"It's possible, dear, but I don't see where I could possibly put shielding that wouldn't block the transmitter. If it turns out the waveforms interfere with each other, we can recalibrate to compensate for most of the distortion."

"Recalibrating in the field wouldn't be a good idea. It might have completely unforeseen effects on the spiders. If you don't allow for every --"

"I don't mean to barge in," Kaiobito interrupted hesitantly, "but is there any possibility that this might harm humans or animals? Hey, watch it," he added as Vegeta shoved him to one side to see better.

"Or Eighteen?" Kuririn asked, standing on tiptoe to see the device. He was holding a sleeping Marron in the crook of his arm.

Bulma shook her head. "No. To Earth creatures, it won't be any more harmful than normal background radiation, and Eighteen is constructed much better than these creatures. It was just luck that Daddy found the particular frequency that would shut down the spiders."

"Frequencies, not frequency," Dr. Briefs corrected his daughter. "I imagine it was programmed in as an emergency override in case they ever rebelled or got out of control, because it's unlikely such a thing could happen by chance. It's actually a very complex waveform with --"

"You've found a way to neutralize the spiders?" Vegeta inserted.

Bulma looked up at him and broke into a wide grin. "Yes, we have! We haven't field-tested it yet, but it worked like a charm on the one in the lab."

"Which could mean nothing," Dr. Briefs reminded her, "if every one of them has a unique frequency."

Bulma shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. There are just too many of them. They had to have been produced on an assembly line, and it would be riduculous for each one to be individually calibrated. At most, we might encounter a few distinct types, but we can prepare for that too if we rig up some sort of band-scanner that will find the right combination of waveforms a million times faster than we could do it by trial and error."

"But you've found a way to neutralize them," Vegeta persisted.

"Yes." Bulma hesitated. "The only problem is that the radiation we need to use is very low-frequency and doesn't carry well through Earth's atmosphere."

"Meaning what, woman?" Vegeta demanded impatiently.

"Meaning we can't rig up some kind of long-range broadcaster," Dr. Briefs answered him. "The spiders will have to be neutralized from close range."

"How close is 'close'?" Kuririn asked.

"It depends on conditions," Bulma said. "Probably no more than a few hundred yards."

"It'll take forever to get every spider on Earth that way," said Piccolo, who was also observing the machine.

"I don't think 'forever' is the right term," Kaiobito murmured. "But a long time, certainly."

"Depends on how many people we have working on it," Bulma said. "Now that we've found the right frequency, most devices that produce some form of radiation can be easily modified to broadcast in that spectrum, though the range will depend on what you're using. Portable TVs, radios, even flashlights can all be used. We can turn most common household appliances into weapons. It'll just be time-consuming to do it."

"This is all assuming that whatever is in that spaceship doesn't decide to pay us a visit," Goku said from behind Vegeta.

"True," Bulma agreed. She bit her lip. "We may not have enough time."

"So we'll split up," Vegeta said shortly. Honestly, did he have to do ALL the thinking for this bunch? "We certainly have enough people here. Some will stay to combat the spiders, and some will attack the spaceship directly." He knew which group he intended to be in. Fighting with flashlights wasn't his style.

"Attack with what?" Bulma retorted. "A bicycle and a BB gun? In case you hadn't noticed, Rambo, we don't happen to have any capsule warships lying around."

"I do not intend a frontal assault, woman," Vegeta said stiffly. "On a ship so large, a small group of individuals should be able to easily penetrate its defenses."

"And then what? The thing's the size of a city, and we can't scan it," Bulma said. "You could wander around in there for years."

"Are you forgetting I've spend most of my life on spaceships? Freeza's fleet contained many different kinds of ships, and I can pilot them all. No matter how alien the design, certain elements are common to all spacegoing vessels. I doubt if it will present much of a challenge for me."

"Nice to see your ego's still intact, Vegeta," Kuririn said with a grin.

"Hey, Bulma! Look what I found!" came a shout from behind them.

With a mostly recovered Pu'ar hovering over his head and trying unsuccessfully to stop him, Yamcha waded into the group of people clustered around the machine, cheerfully swinging a sword around his head. Everyone ducked, some with shrieks of terror -- except for Kuririn; the sword cleared his head by a good two feet.

"What are you trying to do, idiot, behead us all?" Piccolo demanded.

"Oh. Sorry." Yamcha grinned sheepishly. Pu'ar buried her face in her paws in dismay.

"Where'd you get that?" Bulma asked.

"I found it in one of your closets. I guess I accidentally left it here when I went off after the Cell Games. I'd given up fighting by that time; I wondered where it got off to, every once in a while ..." He tested the edge on the blade. "I bet this'd go right through spider carcasses, huh?"

"Why don't you go try it out and leave us alone," Vegeta snapped at him.

"How about I try it out on your neck?"

Vegeta bared his teeth in a predatory grin. "You're forgetting who you're talking to, _human._ I could disintegrate your body with one punch."

"Not anymore," Yamcha said, his eyes widening as the realization hit him that, for the first and probably the last time, he might actually stand a chance against Vegeta.

"Boys! Stop it!" Bulma yelled at them, and then, confronted by this particular example of juvenile behavior, she suddenly realized that she had a lab full of the strongest fighters on the planet with nothing to occupy their time except by _fighting each other._ In a moment of panic, she looked around the room. Gohan was sparring with Gotenks in a corner, their flailing limbs narrowly missing destroying Dr. Briefs' priceless prototype pocket particle accellerator (it was only three feet in diameter but sixty miles long through the fourth dimension), while Mrs. Briefs determinedly tried to serve them cookies. Nearby Eighteen was testing her reflexes by tossing flasks of highly explosive chemicals and catching them. In another corner, Oolong, bored, was throwing capsules to the floor to see what came out of them; at the moment Bulma happened to be looking at him, he'd just uncapsulated a carton of milk which burst upon contact with the floor, splattering the biplane and the yellow submarine that he'd most recently enlarged. Videl and Chi-Chi were fending off a battered but persistent Master Roshi with (respectively) a Bunsen burner and a large briefcase labeled EBOLA SAMPLES, DO NOT OPEN.

Bulma came to the conclusion that her lab was not by any means the safest place for this group of people.

She clapped her hands together. "Hey! Everybody!"

No one noticed her. Goku and Kuririn were trying to drag apart Vegeta and Yamcha, while a disgruntled Piccolo had his hands full (literally) with Marron, who had been shoved into his arms when Kuririn went to keep his friend from getting pulverized. Over in Oolong's corner, there was a shriek of terror as the pig accidentally opened one of Dr. Briefs' experimental ZooCaps(TM); this one contained a velociraptor, or rather, had contained it.

"HEY!" Bulma yelled at the top of her lungs. She picked up the bazooka lying next to the spider neutralizing apparatus and aimed it over their heads, at which point she was tackled by an alert and horrified Pu'ar. It was like being hit with a small, blue, fuzzy cannonball; Bulma dropped the bazooka, which went off and sent a shell spinning into the opposite wall, killing the velociraptor, singeing Oolong, and most definitely getting everyone's attention.

There was a moment of silence as the smoke cleared. Mrs. Briefs was the first to start moving again; with the speed of long practice, she grabbed a fire extinguisher off a nearby wall and went to put out the small spot blazes before they reached any flammable chemicals.

"Well, now that I have your attention," Bulma said into the dead calm, plucking Pu'ar off her arm and handing her back to a stunned Yamcha. "Once you people clean up the lab, why don't we see about dividing into groups and hunting some spiders?"

"Us?" Yamcha said in disbelief, stroking Pu'ar to calm her down.

"Yeah, who wrecked it just now?" Oolong demanded, sticking his snout out from under the lab table where he'd taken shelter.

"Oh, quit complaining." Bulma picked up the spider neutralizer ray, which looked as if it had been cobbled together out of old appliance parts and a cannibalized satellite dish--which was more or less true. "Now this is the most powerful one we have, but my father's already made two more small ones and we can modify just about everything in here that can broadcast on any frequency. We can send out teams of two or three people to start shutting down the spiders and take more neutralizers to the military and anyone else who'd be able to help. We have more than enough capsule planes for everyone."

"What about the other part of it?" Kuririn asked, taking back Marron. "Infiltrating the ship?"

"I think Vegeta and I are doing that," Goku spoke up.

The prince glared at him, still trying to smooth over his ruffled pride. "Who the hell invited you, Kakarrot?"

"You certainly aren't doing it alone," Bulma snapped at him.

"I'm the logical one, Vegeta, because we can fuse and then we'll be a lot more powerful than we are now," Goku said.

"Fusion. With you."

"Yeah," Goku said, grinning. "C'mon, we've done it before and you know we work very well together."

"I have no intention of going through that ordeal again."

Goku's jaw took on a stubborn set. "Vegeta, you don't have a choice. We need the power boost. It's more important than your pride."

Vegeta gave him a long, inscrutable look. Goku glared steadily back at him, not dropping his eyes. Surprisingly, it was Vegeta who looked away first.

"Do you have any idea how much you annoy me, Kakarrot?"

"But Vegeta ... if I bother you that much, all you have to do is stay away from me. You keep coming back."

Vegeta opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. "You're an idiot," he said finally, falling back on his default response to anything Goku said.

Yamcha and Kuririn watched in fascination. "It's so weird," Kuririn said. "I still can't get used to it. They really are friends, or something like it."

"Goku's probably the only guy who _could_ be friends with Vegeta," Yamcha said, releasing Pu'ar, who floated up to hover above his shoulder. "He's the only one who'd take the abuse."

"Well, him and Bulma," Kuririn said, then snapped his mouth shut, flushing, when Yamcha shot him a sharp look.

"Yes, and Bulma, I suppose."

"Sorry, man," Kuririn apologized. "I didn't mean to bring that up."

Yamcha shook his head, and grinned slightly. "It hasn't bothered me in years, to tell you the truth. I mean, sure it was weird at the time, but Bulma and I weren't exactly the perfect match; I think we even knew back then that we wouldn't end up together. I wouldn't have pegged her for Vegeta, of all people, but ... you know. Folks will surprise you." He shrugged. "Bulma especially."

Oblivious to the fact that she was being discussed, Bulma strode to the center of the room. "If you guys are done flinging your testosterone about, or whatever the Saiyajin equivalent might be, does anyone have any ideas for getting onto the alien ship? Anybody?"

"You're the frikkin' genius," Oolong muttered, brushing himself off.

"What's to wonder about?" Vegeta demanded, turning away from Goku. "We send a small group of fighters in a small ship. That's all."

"We saw on the news that they have some sort of laser defense system," Bulma said.

Vegeta crossed his arms and snorted. "Hmph, sure, if you try a full-frontal assault like your Earth military seems so fond of doing. They'll never shoot you if they don't know you're there."

"I'm sure they have sensors, though," Gohan spoke up.

"We do have one capsule ship that's supposed to be invisible to most types of radar," Dr. Briefs said.

Bulma brightened. "Oh, Daddy, that's right! The ZX-72 project."

"The what?" Vegeta said.

Bulma turned to him. "A stealth ship in a capsule. The military paid us to develop it, but in the end we decided not to do it for ethical reasons. It's not as if we need the money, after all."

Vegeta rolled his eyes, though it wasn't clear whether he was exasperated with the state of Earth technology or with the Briefs' finickiness.

"So it's unfinished?" Gohan asked.

Dr. Briefs shook his head. "I finished it as a challenge, though I never told the military that I'd done so. I still have the capsule around here somewhere. I can look for it; hold on."

"Wonderful!" Bulma said as her father rummaged through cabinets. "We can use the ZX-72 ship to get up there. Then, once we're there --"

"We?" Vegeta said.

"Well, of course I'm coming. Who else would be able to figure out what's jamming your ki and disable it?"

"Me," Vegeta said flatly.

Bulma snorted. "Oh, right, you! Mister 'I broke the gravity chamber Onna, fix it now' is going to figure out some weird piece of alien technology that none of us have ever seen before. Yeah, right."

"Aren't you needed here to make spider-neutralizers, Mrs. Briefs?" Videl asked.

Bulma shook her head. "It's more important for me to be there. After all, if we can get you guys' ki working again, you won't need my gadgets. You'll be able to wipe out all the spiders in just a few hours." Her face grew wistful for a moment. "Wow, with my brains, imagine what I could do if I had ki powers like you guys."

Vegeta folded his arms. "Using ki has nothing to do with intelligence, woman."

Bulma's wistful expression morphed into a wicked smirk not unlike Vegeta's characteristic look. "That must explain how you're so good at it, then."

"You walked right into that one, Vegeta," Goku said, grinning.

"Shut up, Kakarrot."

"I can go with Dad and Vegeta," Gohan said quickly in an attempt to head off another argument. "It would probably be better to have as many powerful fighters as we can in the group that goes onto the ship."

"The fusions are more powerful than the rest of us by far," Piccolo pointed out, looking at Gotenks.

"Absolutely not!" Chi-Chi snapped. "Neither one of my boys is going anywhere near that ... that alien monstrosity."

No one heard her, however, because everyone was looking speculatively at Gotenks. Gohan was the one to voice what they were all thinking. "Hey, Gotenks, how long have you been fused, anyway?"

Gotenks frowned up at the adults. "Uh, I dunno. Awhile."

"It's been over an hour," Bulma said, checking her watch.

"But that's not possible," Goku said. "Fusion is only supposed to last 30 minutes."

"Maybe it has something to do with their low-powered state ...?" Gohan mused. "Maybe it's some kind of imbalance between the two individual ki's that causes the separation to occur, and maybe it's just not happening in this situation."

Chi-Chi's hands flew to her mouth in dismay.

"Do you feel any different?" Piccolo asked Gotenks.

"Different from what?" The boy flexed his arms, and shrugged. "Just more powerful than I am normally, is all."

Chi-Chi looked near tears. "Goten! I knew this wasn't safe! I knew your father shouldn't have taught you to do this! You're too young!" She grabbed the startled boy by the shoulders, shaking him. "Goten, come out of there right now!"

Goku put an arm around her, trying to drag her away. "Chi-Chi, it's okay," he soothed. "Goten's not hurt."

"But ... he's not Goten," Chi-Chi sobbed, all her courage of the last few hours draining away as she was confronted by the most horrible thing she could have imagined: a threat to one of her sons, to his very identity.

"Shh. Of course he is. I've been fused, Chi-Chi, remember? It's still Goten in there. It's just Trunks, too."

Gotenks watched in confusion, unable to understand why everyone seemed so concerned; he felt fine. "So do I get to come along?" he asked.

"I ..." Bulma faltered. "As your mother, I would say yes. You'll be with me and your father, after all. But ... I think it's up to Chi-Chi and Goku, too ..."

She trailed off, looking over at Goku, who was trying to calm down Chi-Chi.

"No!" the dark-haired woman cried, grabbing Goku by the front of his gi. "I can't stop you from leaving; you're my husband. But I'm not sending my children into such terrible danger. I'm their mother! Who ... who will ..." She began to cry. "Who will I have if you're all killed? Please don't leave me alone."

Gohan approached them, and took his mother gently by the shoulders. "Mom, listen. Goten and Trunks have to go. They're probably stronger right now than anyone else; Dad and Vegeta need their help. I'll stay and take care of you, okay?"

"Gohan ..." Goku began.

Gohan smiled at his father. "It'll be all right, Dad. I can do a lot down here, too. I can help Dr. Briefs make more of the spider-neutralizing machines; it'll be important if Bulma is up there with you. And I'm not that powerful right now, unless you and I fuse, and there isn't time for you to teach me the fusion dance."

Goku smiled softly, and gripped his oldest son's shoulder. "Maybe that's best, then."

"You!" Piccolo exclaimed suddenly.

Everyone spun around to look at him. While everyone else had been watching the scene with Goku, Gohan and Chi-Chi, Piccolo had been staring speculatively at Kaiobito.

"What?" the god asked nervously.

"You're a fusion too," Piccolo said. "Can you do anything with your ki?"

"I ... I don't know," Kaiobito faltered. "I guess I just assumed that I was as powerless as all of you." He held up his hands in front of his face and concentrated. Sweat broke out on his face as slowly, a ki ball began to form between his palms.

Goku laughed out loud. "That's great! You too!"

"Oh, good. If we happen to come upon a room with no light switches, we'll be all set. But can you do anything useful?" Vegeta snapped impatiently. "Are you stronger? Faster? Can you teleport?"

"Hmm." Kaiobito concentrated. Suddenly he vanished, and reappeared at the other side of the lab.

There were scattered cheers among the onlookers, which faded out when they saw Kaiobito's dejected expression. "I was trying to go back to Kaioshin-kai," he explained. "It seems that all I can manage is fifty feet or so."

"But that could still be very useful in a fight," Goku said, his cheerfulness undaunted. With a final pat to Gohan and Chi-Chi's shoulders, he walked back to join the others. "Would you be willing to come with us?"

"Of course. I'll help in any way possible."

"I think we should take the shapeshifters too," Bulma said, looking at Pu'ar and Oolong.

The pig quailed. "Not this shapeshifter, lady."

"Everyone else is risking their lives to help. What have you done lately?"

"I'll have you know I saved them!" Oolong snapped, pointing at Kuririn and Eighteen. "And did I get a word of thanks? Huh? Not a chance. Ingrates," he pouted.

"You want _him_ to come?" Vegeta asked his mate in disbelief.

"Yes! Keep in mind, Vegeta: this is a different fight than the ones you're used to. We're going to be fighting with our minds, not our bodies. If you go up against this enemy head-on, like you usually do, you'll die. We need strategy and we need every unexpected advantage we can get. I'd say the shapeshifters are our best bet."

"I'll go," Pu'ar chirped bravely.

"If Pu'ar goes then so do I," Yamcha said, hefting his sword.

Vegeta rolled his eyes. "This is turning into a sideshow, not a war party. Who's next? Her?" He pointed at Mrs. Briefs, who looked back blankly.

"You can take the entire Mr. Satan Fan Club if you want to," Oolong said, planting his feet. "I'm not going."

"If you come with us, I'll show you these," Bulma said, pointing to her chest with both hands.

"WHAT!" Vegeta's voice approached a shriek.

"What?" Oolong echoed.

"You always wanted to see them when we used to travel together. Well, now's your chance."

"Onna ..." Vegeta said dangerously.

"Oh, shut up," Bulma told him.

"Well, yeah, but you were young and pretty _then,"_ Oolong said.

He realized his potentially fatal mistake when both Bulma and Vegeta turned on him. Everybody else suddenly found the far side of the lab much, much more interesting. Kaiobito accidentally teleported himself into a stack of Petri dishes with a loud clatter.

"I ... will have you know ... you ... little ... pig ..." Bulma snarled, advancing a step with each word, the gleam of death in her eyes. "I am just as beautiful as I used to be! And just as firm! Isn't that right, Vegeta? Tell him!"

"I--huh?" Vegeta turned from preparing to pound Oolong into the floor. He actually blushed. Goku started laughing.

"You'll never know if you never look," Bulma told Oolong.

"Will he kill me if I do?" Oolong squeaked, casting nervous sidelong glances at the homicidal-looking Vegeta.

"No. I won't let him."

"Woman, I absolutely forbid you to --"

"You? You have no right to forbid me to do anything. The fate of the world is at stake, and these are _my_ ... assets," Bulma informed him. "You defend the world your way; I'll do it mine."

"I feel so used," Oolong grumbled.

Bulma winked at him, causing Vegeta's hair to bristle even more than it normally did. "Are you coming then?" she asked him.

"Do you promise?" the pig asked cannily.

"Yes. I swear on my, uh ... on my honor as queen of the planet Vegeta!" Bulma crowed in triumph.

Vegeta gritted his teeth, trying to divide his glare between her, Oolong, and the hysterical Goku, who was almost falling down laughing, while Gohan tried desperately to get his father to shut up. "There is no planet Vegeta anymore, woman," Vegeta growled. "It's been destroyed."

"Yes, but if there _was,_ I would be its queen-consort, wouldn't I?" Bulma inquired, tapping her foot.

"Well, technically ..."

"There! You see?" She spun towards Oolong. "So what do you say? This may be your only chance to see a queen's br--"

Vegeta shut her up by simply covering her mouth with his hand. "Mmmph!" Bulma shrieked through his gloved fingers, peeved.

"I'll come! I'll come!" Master Roshi called across the room.

Vegeta spun around, raising his free hand in the attack position. "Final F-- fuck," he muttered, remember that he couldn't use ki.

"I'll go along on your suicide mission," Oolong grumbled. "But only if you keep _him_ away from me. And keep your side of the bargain."

"Deal!" Bulma said, finally managing to work her mouth free of Vegeta's grip.

Vegeta glared at his mate in fury, realizing that she'd just caused him to lose face in front of practically everybody he knew, and let go of her, spinning away from her with his arms crossed. "It's on your head if this idiot gets us killed then," he growled.

"If it's unexpected abilities that you're looking for ..." Piccolo spoke up. Bulma turned to look at him. "My regeneration skills proved to be quite useful when I was fighting the spiders. They do not seem to recognize my species. I killed several of them by myself." He said it without bragging, matter-of-factly.

"Piccolo, that's amazing! Vegeta and I only got two, and I got hurt bad doing it," Goku said cheerfully. Vegeta scowled at him.

"I can fight them quite effectively as well," Eighteen spoke up.

Bulma spread her hands. "We can't take everybody! We should leave at least a few of the good fighters on Earth. Keep in mind that Daddy and I haven't even tested our invention yet, and if it doesn't work, there may be a lot of fighting ahead of you, especially if we ..." Her voice faltered slightly. "If we fail."

"Well, then," Goku said, breaking the silence that followed her last words. "It looks like we've got me ... and you, Bulma; and Gotenks, Kaiobito, Vegeta, Oolong, Pu'ar, and Piccolo."

"And me," Yamcha spoke up. "I told you. Me and Pu'ar, we're a team. She doesn't go anywhere I don't go."

Vegeta rolled his eyes.

"That's a good group," Bulma said. "We all have a lot of different skills. I think we've got better than just a fighting chance ... I think we can win this one, guys."

Kuririn cleared his throat. "Hey ... Goku? Bulma?" he asked with unexpected deference.

"Hmm?" Goku looked at his best friend in surprise.

"I'd like to go, too," Kuririn said quietly. "I know I don't really have anything to add to the group; I don't have special abilities, and I don't even fight that well anymore. And I know I wasn't really any help at all against Cell, or Buu, or ... well, even Freeza really. But maybe that's exactly why I feel like I ... I need to do something." He looked down at Marron, asleep in his arms, and then handed her gently to Eighteen. "This is my world, and my daughter is here, my family is here. I haven't been much use at defending it in the past, but I would like to try."

There was a long silence, and then Goku smiled at him. "Of course you have that right," he said, in a voice that was light, and yet at the same time, brooked no argument.

Into the new silence that followed his statement, Dr. Briefs' voice rang out loud and clear from the depths of the lab. "Hey, I found it!" He straightened up, holding a black capsule above his head.

"The ZX-72," Bulma said softly, a slight shiver running through her.

Goku looked around at those who would be left behind: Gohan, Videl, Chi-Chi, Ox King, Master Roshi, Eighteen, and the Briefs. It was a small group to take on the monumental task of eliminating the spiders who had already come to Earth.

As if reading his mind, Bulma stepped forward and handed the ki radar to Gohan. "You guys start making more spider nullifiers, and send somebody to find Tien and Chaotzu and anybody else who can help down here. Get the military on your side. Whether or not we come back, you can still do this; it's a big job, and hard, but it's up to you guys." She smiled. "Go save the world."

Dr. Briefs handed his daughter the black capsule. She took it with a small grin.

"We have two senzu beans left. Do you guys want one?" Goku asked.

Gohan shook his head. "No, you take them. We have all the technology of Capsule Corporation down here to help us if somebody gets hurt. You guys are on your own."

Gotenks and Goku waved to Chi-Chi and Gohan, and then the two groups separated, and Bulma led her small group of followers out of the lab.

The door slammed behind them. It had a hollow, final sound. For a moment, the ones left behind could only stand and stare at the door. Then Videl shook herself and turned to the others.

"Come on," she said, clapping her hands together. "Don't just stand there. Like she said ... let's go save the world."

Gohan, however, continued staring at the door for a few minutes after everyone else had sprung into action. He was still deeply bothered by the fact that his little brother and Trunks had not separated yet. Fusion, he had thought, was a safe and understood and predictable technique ... but obviously fusion in a low-energy situation worked differently, and he couldn't help thinking that his father and the others were being fools to rely, in such critical circumstances, on a technique when they didn't even know what it might do to them.


	11. The Trouble With Fusion

As the ZX-72 capsule ship flew away from the roof of Capsule Corp., the nighttime panorama of the city spread out beneath them. Normally, the city would be a glittering wonderland of lights, but during this catastrophe, it was almost completely dark. Here and there, small explosions blossomed in the great blackness. Bulma's eyes were drawn to an ominous glow on the horizon ... on top of everything else, it looked as if the fighting was causing forest fires in the outlying areas.

"I hope we're not making a mistake," Bulma said softly, speaking for the first time since leaving.

She was flying the plane, with Yamcha beside her as a co-pilot. Vegeta was not very happy about this state of affairs, but he was confident enough of his mate's loyalties that he hadn't been obvious about it. He was in the back with the others. The plane lacked seats aside from the two in front; it had been designed as a creative exercise, not a consumer aircraft, so it was utterly lacking in amenities. The exterior was matte black, the interior unpainted gray metal. The group of would-be world saviors, undaunted, had all found places to stand or sit.

Vegeta was leaning against the plane's side, arms folded as usual. Goku was sitting cross-legged near his knees; Piccolo was meditating on the floor; Kaiobito leaned over Bulma's shoulder, watching the screens; Kuririn was standing at a window, looking back towards the dwindling lights of Capsule Corp and his family; Pu'ar hovered above Yamcha's head; Oolong was in a corner by himself, sulking and grumbling; and Gotenks was sitting against a wall, hands folded quietly in his lap, watching the adults and waiting for something to happen. Normally he would have been right in the middle of things, but he was sleepy ... no, not sleepy exactly, just very tired. His eyelids felt heavy, and he was also cold, the way somebody gets cold when they haven't had enough sleep in a long time. He rubbed his arms with his hands, trying to warm up. His head hurt, too.

"What do you mean?" Yamcha asked Bulma.

"It's just such a huge job." Bulma sighed, and pressed her fingers against her eyes; they ached already from doing so much close-up work in the last few hours, and she knew that the night had just begun. "I mean, we have most of the powerful people up here. I can't help wondering how they're going to do down there."

"They'll do all right. Gohan was the one who defeated Cell, remember?" Yamcha reminded her. "And keep in mind: the power structure of the world is different right now. Eighteen is probably a better fighter at the moment than any of the Saiyajin or half-breeds. Remember, I saw her fight the spiders. She did very well."

Bulma smiled faintly. "I guess we're in more danger than they are. It's just hard not to worry, with my parents and so many of my friends down there ..." She trailed off, and looked over her shoulder. "And I can't help worrying about Trunks, too. And Goten, of course. It can't be a good sign that the kids haven't unfused."

"What do you mean?" Yamcha asked, following her gaze to the boy sitting against the wall. Gotenks's eyes were closed; he appeared to be either asleep or meditating.

"It just worries me. I mean, I can't see how it could possibly be harmful, but there's just so many things we don't know about fusion."

"Fusion has never hurt anyone, as far as I know," Yamcha tried to reassure her.

"I know. Maybe I'm just being a worry-wart mom." Bulma sighed, and returned her eyes to the screens. Musing internally, she realized that most of her worries about the others were just a way of redirecting her real concern: that the group of them were going to get blown out of the sky as soon as they got close to the alien ship. She and Yamcha were up front because they were the two best pilots in the group; Vegeta was also good, but he was not as familiar with piloting Earth-style ships as the two of them, and also out of practice because he customarily flew under his own power. So if anyone in the group could evade enemy fire, it was Bulma and Yamcha, but Bulma knew that they really didn't have much of a chance if the enemy ship got a good lock on them. They would have to depend more on the untested shielding around the ZX-72.

"There it is," Pu'ar whispered in a serious tone she rarely used.

The great dark bulk of the ship loomed on their sensors--a black mass against the stars. They were flying mostly blind, unable to use most of the plane's sensors because almost everything except the visuals relied upon transmitting sonic or radio pulses, and they did not dare risk being detected. As a result, they had no idea how far away the ship was, but Bulma could see from the altimeter that they were flying very high, and so she estimated, from looking at the mountains under the ship, that they still had about an hour until they would start getting close enough to have to worry about the ship's defenses.

Slowly the distance closed. As they approached, a red haze began to swim into focus around the underbelly of the ship.

Yamcha let out a low whistle when he realized what it was. "Wow, look at that."

Spiders. Hundreds, thousands, millions, all clustered around the ship's underbelly. As they flew closer and closer, they could see small red sparks flutter down from the red glow towards the planet below--platoons of spiders heading downwards to join their companions on Earth. From this distance, the groups (each consisting of dozens or hundreds of spiders) appeared as single individuals.

"How can there be so many of them?" Bulma asked in frustration.

"I don't know," Yamcha said. "But I do know one thing. We'd better not try to go through them."

Bulma nodded. "You're right. This plane may be undetectable to the ship--at least, we're gambling on it--but the spiders will be able to _see_ us, and then the gig will be up. We'll have to try to go in from above. There are no spiders up there."

"Possibly meaning that there's no way in from up there, either," Kaiobito murmured.

"We don't have any choice," Bulma said. She pulled the plane into a steep climb. They were very high now, and the atmosphere was thin, but the ship was fully pressurized and designed to operate all the way up to outer space if necessary.

Bulma looked over her shoulder. "Hey, guys! We're getting close."

Goku woke from the light doze into which he'd fallen, and looked up at Vegeta. "Hey, Vegeta, we'd better try our fusion soon."

"Why?" Vegeta said, looking down.

Goku shrugged. "That way, we'll know ahead of time if something is going to go wrong. If we end up in a less powerful state, we can take the ship in a whatchamacallit, a holding pattern or something, and wait for the fusion to wear off so we won't be at a disadvantage when we attack."

"But if the fusion works, then it'll wear off as soon as we get inside if we do it now, Kakarrot," Vegeta snapped. "Give it a few more minutes."

Goku grinned. "But you still think my idea is a good one; you just want to do it your way. Okay, we can do that."

Vegeta gritted his teeth.

In a corner in the back, Oolong muttered to himself, "I can't believe I'm doing this, I can't believe I'm doing this ... even naked women are not worth this ... I can see plenty of naked women in pictures, but not if I'm dead ..."

Kaiobito came over to the group in the back of the plane. "Bulma says we have about twenty minutes left before we'll be ready to start looking for a place to land."

Piccolo opened one eye. "We appear to still be alive."

Kaiobito nodded, a smile breaking over his face. "The ship has not fired on us. The plane's shields seem to work."

Kuririn laughed aloud and punched the air. "All right! Score another one for the Briefs clan. Now if we can just get in ..."

Goku reached over to shake at Gotenks' shoulder. "Hey, Gotenks. We're almost there. Wake up."

Gotenks squinted at him. "Huh?"

"Wake up," Goku repeated, grinning at him. "You get to do your thing soon."

Gotenks grinned, opening both his eyes. "All right." He sat up, rubbing at his eyes. If only he wasn't so tired ... His headache had not been improved by his nap, and it pounded at his temples until he thought it might tear his head apart. He looked up to see Goku giving him a worried look.

"Are you all right?" Goku asked him, frowning.

 _If I tell them I don't feel good, they'll make me go home and I won't be able to see the inside of the ship._ "Yeah, I'm still waking up, I guess," he said, yawning.

Goku smiled, accepting the explanation. "I guess it is the middle of the night." Patting the boy on the shoulder, he stood up in the trembling plane. "I wish we could fuse more of us," he mused. "If it really increases our power as much as it does for Gotenks and Kaiobito ..." Suddenly his voice faded away and his head snapped up.

Vegeta looked over at him. "Hey, Kakarrot, what's the matter with you?"

"Fusion," Goku mumbled, staring at Kaiobito, who took a step back. Then he turned to look at the shapeshifters. "Hey, Oolong, Pu'ar!"

Pu'ar rotated in the air, and Oolong raised a bleak face.

"Can you guys turn into Potara earrings?" Goku asked.

There was a long, stunned silence. Finally Vegeta spoke.

"Kakarrot," he said slowly, giving Goku a long appraising look. "Sometimes you are not nearly as much of an idiot as you appear."

"I'm not sure, Goku-san," Pu'ar said worriedly. "It's very difficult to change into something you've never seen."

"You're quite mad," Oolong said more bluntly.

"I'll describe them to you," Goku said eagerly. "And describe all their properties. When you guys change shape, you can do everything that your new shape can do, right? If you're a machine, you can drive. If you're a pair of scissors, you can cut things. Bulma, do you have a piece of paper?"

"In the glove box," Bulma said. Yamcha looked, since Bulma could not take her attention away from driving. He found a pad of graph paper and a pencil, and passed it back to Goku, who began to sketch a crude Potara earring. Pu'ar floated close, and Oolong was propelled over by a helpful shove from Piccolo.

"Keep in mind that our mass stays the same," Pu'ar said. "We will be very, very heavy earrings."

Goku shrugged. "That shouldn't matter. As long as you can do everything that a normal Potara earring can do."

"Since no one has asked the important question yet, I will obviously have to do it," Oolong snapped. "Will this hurt US?"

"Fusion doesn't have any effect on the earrings themselves at all," Goku said.

"Unless I crush them, of course," Vegeta said, grinning at Oolong.

Oolong made a tiny, stifled squeak of terror.

Goku glared at Vegeta. "Stop that." He added to Oolong, "There should be no danger at all, right Bulma?"

"Why are you asking me?!" Bulma demanded.

"You're a genius," Goku said, wide-eyed.

Bulma heaved a sigh. "Not that I can see, though I think this is sort of a stupid idea."

"There's absolutely no way I --" Oolong began.

"Remember the bargain," Bulma said to him.

Oolong's eyes widened lustfully. Vegeta growled.

Pu'ar turned to Yamcha. "Yamcha-sama, what should I do?"

"Don't do anything if you don't feel right about it," Yamcha told her. "Your welfare is important too. You know more about your abilities than we do. If you think it might work ... then do what you think is best."

Pu'ar drew a deep breath, and then she transformed.

An apparently perfect Potara earring hovered in the air.

"Yes!" Goku cried happily. He looked at Oolong.

"Oh, leave me alone," the pig grumbled. He concentrated. There was a small flash, and then a very dense Potara earring thudded to the floor.

Goku picked up Oolong. "Wonderful! I can't believe it worked."

"Half of it worked," said the hovering Pu'ar earring. "We still haven't tried to see if we actually can fuse people. And we'd better hurry, or Oolong will change back."

"This just leaves one ... rather obvious question," Vegeta said, looking around the interior of the ship. "Who's going to wear them?"

"We need the people with the highest ki," Goku said. "That's what's important in fusion. Physical strength doesn't matter than much, though it helps. Keep in mind, the people who first demonstrated the fusion technique to me were just little weak guys, but fused together, they became very strong."

Everyone on the plane glanced around at each other. Kaiobito and Gotenks were already fused, and Goku and Vegeta were capable of non-assisted fusion, which caused everyone's eyes to slowly settle on two people.

Piccolo and Kuririn cast sideways glances at each other, and their expressions changed to an identical look of horror. They backed away from each other.

"Not possible."

"No way!"

"The only other option is to fuse with Bulma," Goku said.

"HEY!" Bulma yelled. "Forget it!"

"... and that's pointless, since the whole idea here is to enhance your ability to use ki ..."

"Yeah, what he said--hey, wait a minute!" Bulma snapped.

"... or Yamcha."

"He's still not a good option," Vegeta said shortly. "Not strong enough in ki."

"We could turn around, go back and get Gohan," Kuririn babbled nervously. "He and Piccolo would be a great match, heh heh, right Piccolo?"

"We'd never find Gohan without the ki detector," Bulma said. "We can't afford to waste what time we have looking around for him. If Daddy's machine doesn't work, the Earth will be a wasteland soon."

"Well ..." Kuririn said slowly, eyeing Piccolo. "I guess I could deal with it."

"Potara fusion is PERMANENT," Piccolo reminded him.

"... oh, I forgot about that ..."

"We don't know how this kind of fusion will work," Goku said. "It could only last a few minutes. All we can do is try."

Kuririn took a deep breath and, closing his eyes, he held out his hand towards Pu'ar, who floated towards his fingers. "I'll do it."

"I don't think this is a good idea," Piccolo said through clenched fangs.

Kuririn opened his eyes. "Oh, come on," he snapped. "You've already got an army in your head. You'd hardly notice me."

"Yeah, you're small enough," Oolong snickered. "Heh heh heh ... *ow*" as Goku reproachfully tapped him with a fingertip.

"Look who's talking," Yamcha said.

"Kami, Nail and I hardly qualify as an 'army'," Piccolo retorted to Kuririn. His eyes widened. "That's right ... I am already a fusion. I've become so accustomed to it that I hardly think about it anymore." He narrowed his eyes and glanced at Goku. "Why hasn't it enhanced my power?"

"It probably has," Goku said. "Just not very much. Remember what I told you when I demonstrated the fusion dance for you? Namekian fusion is different from the other kinds. It's much less powerful. However, it means that you probably do have more ki than anyone else here, besides Gotenks and Kaiobito. You won't do the earring fusion, huh?" He thought a moment, and then looked at Yamcha. "I guess it'll be you and Kuririn, then--"

Piccolo held out a hand, stopping him. He took a long, deep, slow breath, and shut his eyes. "I'll ... do it. As you said, Son ... the more ki, the better it'll work."

Yamcha winced. Bulma patted his leg comfortingly. He looked over at her. "I don't even know why I'm here," he said softly to her. "Everyone else is more powerful than me. Well, besides you. Ouch!" The pat had turned into a pinch.

Kaiobito spoke up. "If it's better with more ki, then perhaps Piccolo and I should be the ones to do it?"

"Maybe ..." Goku said. He was somewhat out of his depth--he was excellent at spot strategy, but having to weigh all these options made his head hurt. He was grateful, then, when Vegeta spoke up from his spot leaned against the wall.

"You're already a Potara fusion--what happens when you do more than one?"

"Hm." Kaiobito looked at him, thinking. "I have no idea. My ancestor would know, but I didn't even know about Potara fusion until he demonstrated it ... on me."

Vegeta glanced over, appearing slightly bored by the whole thing. "Well, I can think of three possibilities. It might break the fusion you'd already have, so you wouldn't be much better off. It might add onto it ... which I suppose is what you're hoping for. Or, it might simply not work at all."

"Break the fusion ... I hadn't thought of that," the god said.

"We know that it can happen," Vegeta said, not looking at Goku. "We don't know exactly what _causes_ it to happen, though."

"Would that be a possibility with Piccolo?" Kaiobito asked, and looked at the Namekian. "You said that you were fused. Do you think it might separate you?"

Piccolo snorted. "I don't know too much about Potara fusion, but I do know that what you suggest doesn't apply to me. Our fusion is an inherent property of the Namek-sei-jin race. It's a physical merging--akin to our ability to regenerate our limbs. We could undo it voluntarily, if we so chose, but I cannot see the possibility of any external force managing to break it. Especially with Kami and myself, as we are one being, reunited."

"That might be what makes it different from the other kinds of fusion we know about," Goku offered.

"Hey ... have we decided anything yet?" Kuririn asked plaintively.

"Better decide quick, because I'm going to be changing back any minute now," Oolong muttered.

"And we're getting close to the ship," Bulma put in. "Now would be the time to try any experimental fusions, while we can still turn around if something goes drastically wrong."

Kuririn glared at her. "Thanks. That makes me feel very safe, Bulma-san."

"It seems obvious that, given all the possibilities, Kuririn and I are the best candidates," Piccolo said, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall. "Assuming we attempt this insanity at all."

"Thank you, Piccolo." Goku smiled and handed him the Oolong earring. Piccolo fastened it to his ear, wincing as Oolong's weight dragged downwards.

"This is so humiliating," the former pig whined.

"Shut up!" Piccolo snapped at him. "Do you think this is easy for me?"

Kuririn hesitated, the Pu'ar earring in his hand. "Do you really think this is going to work, Goku?"

"I don't know," Goku admitted. "The more powerful fighters we have, the better our chances, though."

"Well ... if something does go wrong ... take care of Marron for me, will you?" Kuririn smiled at his friend, who didn't know what to say, and then fastened Pu'ar to his ear.

For a moment, nothing happened; then the bodies of the two, one human and one Namekian, were flung together as if by a hurricane. Goku, Vegeta and Kaiobito (the only ones of those watching who had seen or experienced Potara fusion) looked on in interest while the others stared in shock.

Slowly the blaze of blue light faded. A new being stood before them. It was green-skinned and medium height, and it sported green antennae rising above a shock of black hair. It also had furry blue ears and a small pig tail. And was not wearing earrings.

While the Potara fusion had worked, and much better than anyone had expected, it was all too obvious just exactly HOW it had worked.

"PU'AR!" Yamcha cried in horror.

"Heh." Goku rubbed his head. "I wasn't expecting that."

The new fused being (which Goku had immediately dubbed Pikurin-Pulong in his head) looked down curiously at its hands, which had blue fur on the backs of them. "This ... actually isn't bad," Pikurin said in surpise in a mingled voice.

Vegeta chuckled grimly. "Yeah ... so you say NOW. Wait until you split up again. You'll want to scrub your brain out with soap." He looked pleased to finally have someone to commiserate with.

Goku gave him a slightly hurt look. "Being fused with me isn't that bad, is it?"

"Words are not adequate, Kakarrot ..."

Bulma was staring at Pikurin in mingled amazement and disbelief. "Can you transform into other shapes, I wonder?" she asked.

"I ... don't know." Pikurin concentrated and suddenly became a very large sword with green antennae. It changed back almost immediately.

"You can!" Goku exclaimed in delight.

Pikurin was breathing hard. "That's difficult, but I think I could get the hang of it."

"I want Pu'ar back," Yamcha mumbled.

"I'm sure we can find a way to reverse it, once we need to," Kaiobito offered reassuringly, though not entirely convincingly.

Pikurin held out a hand, palm up, and summoned a small ball of ki. "The fusion does appear to have worked as we wanted. I'm definitely much stronger now than I was before."

"That's good, I guess," Bulma mumbled, eyeing the fused being out of the corner of her eyes.

Goku pushed away from the wall. "Well, Vegeta, we shouldn't wait any longer. Let's fuse."

Vegeta gritted his teeth. "Do we have to do it in front of everyone?"

"There's nowhere else to go," Goku said, waving his hand at the open cargo area of the plane.

"You'd better do it soon," Bulma called. "We're very close."

"Look away, woman," Vegeta gritted.

Bulma smirked. "Hey, I've never seen anybody but the kids do the fusion dance before. This'll be interesting." She looked down at Gotenks, who had leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes again. "Hey, Trunks, Goten, don't you want to watch your fathers fuse?"

"Sure," the boy mumbled, yawning. To be honest, he didn't really care. He was very, very cold, and his fingers and toes felt weird--numb and tingly.

"Come on, Vegeta." Goku took up the starting fusion stance. Vegeta sighed and crossed to the other side of the plane.

"I'll get you for this, Kakarrot. Somehow."

"FU --"

"--SION--"

The fusion dance did manage to temporarily distract Yamcha from staring at Pikurin in continued shock and horror. Bulma was trying to stifle her laughter and keep an eye on the plane's screens at the same time.

"--HAAAAAA!!!!"

The familiar flash came, and when it cleared, Gogeta stood in the open space in the middle of the plane's cabin, grinning at them.

"Fascinating ..." Pikurin murmured.

Bulma's laughter died and she found that she could only stare, searching the face of the stranger for the features of her husband and her closest friend, finding them both. Gogeta's grin grew wider, almost a smirk. "Do you like what you see?" he asked.

"I ... I, uh ..." Actually she didn't. The problem was that she was very attracted to Vegeta (obviously) but not at all to Son Goku--she loved him dearly, but she'd known him since he was a small child; it would be like getting the hots for Goten. Now her hormones were very, very confused. "I think I need a cold shower."

"Bulma! The controls!" Yamcha yelled suddenly, reaching for the joystick in front of him.

"Oh, crap!" Between the two of them, they straightened out the plane. They had almost flown directly into the ship.

Everyone except Gotenks crowded around behind Bulma's chair, looking at her screens. The scarred metal surface of the ship unfolded beneath them. It did not look planned, but more like something that had grown piece by piece, with new additions being constructed onto the old ones until the original design of the ship was completely lost beneath spires and domes, tubes and boxlike structures. It looked very, very old. In places, it appeared to have been seared and blackened by laser fire or the heat of passing stars or comets. In other places, it looked as if it had been damaged and crumpled by collisions.

"Now the big question is ... where should we land?" Bulma murmured.

Yamcha looked over his shoulder at the boy dozing against the wall, trying very hard to avoid looking at Pikurin in the process. "Hey, Gotenks! Don't you want to come up here and see the ship?"

There was no response.

"Out like a light again," Gogeta said, and went to wake up the boy.

"Maybe we should have let him take a nap before coming up here," Bulma said. "He is just a little boy, after all."

Gogeta was kneeling by Gotenks now, and an expression of worry crossed his face. "Gotenks?" He shook the boy, very gently at first, and then harder.

"What's wrong? Can't you wake him up?" Pikurin asked.

"No." Gogeta's shaking became almost frantic. "And ... my ki-sense has improved a lot since I fused, but ... I can't feel his ki at all!"

Dislodged by Gogeta's efforts, Gotenks toppled slowly sideways and fell onto the floor.

"Yamcha, take the controls!" Bulma gasped, abandoning her seat to run into the back of the plane. "Trunks--Trunks!"

Gogeta picked up Gotenks in his arms and laid his head down against the boy's chest. When he looked up at the others, he looked almost frightened. "I can barely hear a heartbeat. They're so cold ... I don't understand it at all."

"Trunks ..." Bulma gasped, gripping Gotenks's shoulder. "Trunks, it's Mommy. Please ... Trunks ..."

Kaiobito had been staring at the comatose fused boy. Suddenly he shouted, "We have to unfuse them! We have to unfuse them now!"

Everyone looked up at him in shock. "What? Why?" Gogeta asked.

"There's only one explanation I can think of," Kaiobito said, breathing rapidly in his agitation. "Under normal circumstances, it's nearly impossible to deplete your own ki to the point where it becomes life-threatening. It's like trying to kill yourself by holding your breath. Your body's self-defense mechanisms kick in; you pass out, or become so weak you can't draw on your ki anymore. But in our current low-energy condition, the fusion must allow us to tap into ki reserves that we wouldn't normally be able to touch." He looked at Gogeta, saw the dawning horror in the man's eyes. "You know what I'm talking about. You did it ... I mean, a part of you did, Vegeta did, during the fight with Buu. You burned up your life energy and turned yourself into a fireball. That's similar to what the boys are doing now. Normally as soon as they got too weak, the ki drain would stop, unless they made a monumental effort of will to keep it going. But the fusion requires a small amount of energy to continue. Like water trickling through a hole in a dam, it will keep drawing that energy, even after everything else is used up. Normally it wouldn't be a problem; they'd have energy to spare. But now ..."

He trailed off as tears began to fill Bulma's eyes.

"Trunks!" she screamed, shaking him. "Why--why don't they unfuse? If it's killing them, why don't they unfuse?"

"They must not be able to," Gogeta breathed. "It takes a certain amount of energy to break the fusion. They must have gone below that threshold." His hands, holding the boy's small, fragile body, had begun to tremble slightly.

"We have to separate them, now!" Kaiobito cried. "Or the fusion will keep draining the small amount of energy they have left."

"But how?" Pikurin protested. "The fusion separates normally when the thirty minutes is up. How else could we do it?"

"They should have already separated," Gogeta said, talking rapidly, thinking out loud. "Maybe if we just raise their energy level to the point where it's possible, it'll happen naturally."

"Senzu beans!" Pikurin said.

Gogeta frowned. "No, the senzu beans still can heal injuries, but with the ki-suppressing effect, they don't seem to have their usual energy-boosting properties. I don't think they'll work."

"At least try!" Bulma cried, tears spilling from her eyes. Gotenks's face was very pale, and his breathing had become labored.

Gogeta reached for the pouch at his waist. "You're right. We don't have a choice."

"Wait!" Kaiobito held up a hand. "I used to be able to heal, and most of healing is just transfering and directing energy. Maybe I can use the same ability to transfer some of my energy to them."

He took the small body from Gogeta's arms and knelt on the floor, holding the boy gently. The others watched anxiously as Kaiobito bent his white head over the child, eyes closed, face tranquil in concentration. A soft blue glow began to form around him.

"Don't kill yourself too," Gogeta said.

Kaiobito smiled slightly, but did not open his eyes. The blue glow that suffused him flowed down his arms, like water, and pooled on the child's chest and face.

"Wait!" Bulma exclaimed, her eyes widening in sudden fear. "If they're going to unfuse when their energy reaches the level where they can do it, won't that use up all the energy they have left? Won't it kill them?"

"Shh," Kaiobito murmured. "Let me concentrate. I'm going to try to keep that from happening."

"I can help you, give you some of my energy too," Gogeta began, reaching towards Kaiobito's shoulder.

"No!" Kaiobito still did not open his eyes, but the urgency in his voice stopped Gogeta in mid-movement. "You're going to be in enough trouble soon yourself."

Bulma turned her wide-eyed, horrified look on her husband and friend. "Vegeta, Goku ... oh, no ..."

They had no more time to ponder this, for suddenly the plane tilted and flung them all off their feet. Gogeta caught Kaiobito, breaking his fall; the god still held Gotenks's body firmly, and the blue glow still surrounded him as he fought to save the child's life, not even allowing his own danger to break his concentration.

"Yamcha, what's going on?" Bulma demanded.

Yamcha looked over his shoulder, his hands white-knuckled on the controls. "Sorry, guys! We're being attacked by a spider patrol. There are too many places for them to hide with all the damn towers and junk on the outside of this ship. I didn't even see them until they flew up right in front of us."

The ship tilted again, and they all felt the THUNK! as something struck the hull.

"What--are they just throwing themselves at our plane? That's nuts!" Bulma cried.

"Yeah, they are, but these ... they're different from the ones on the ground," Yamcha gasped, pulling the plane into a sudden steep climb.

"Different how?" Bulma demanded, clinging to the side of the plane to keep from being thrown off her feet.

"Bigger," Yamcha said grimly.

"How much bigger?"

He cast a quick, frightened glance at her. "Each of them is as big as this plane. And there are six of th--"

THUNK! This time the bulkhead behind Bulma bowed inward. She shrieked and stumbled forward.

"If any of them pierces the hull, we're going to die!" Yamcha yelled. "We'll decompress! We're not so high that there's NO atmosphere, but the pressure will still --"

"Well, don't let that happen!" Bulma screamed, fumbling around in the back. "I know I have space suits in here somewhere! Avoid them, Yamcha! Veg--I mean, Gogeta, how's Trunks?"

"I don't know --" Gogeta began, when suddenly there was a flash of light and Kaiobito was holding not one boy, but two. The god gritted his teeth, concentrating on keeping the energy flowing into the boys' bodies. The plane twisted and jolted and turned onto its side as Yamcha rolled it to avoid another spider strike, and Gogeta lost his grip on Kaiobito as Kaiobito lost his grip on the unconscious boys. Along with Pikurin, they all tumbled against the side of the plane.

"Trunks! Goten!" Gogeta gathered them up in his arms.

Kaiobito was picking himself up, dazed. "How are they?" he asked, rubbing his head.

A grin broke across Gogeta's face. "Their ki is still very low, but they're warm, and breathing. Thank you."

Kaiobito answered the smile with one of his own. "At least I could help."

"Are you in danger?" Gogeta asked him.

Kaiobito shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Potara fusion must work differently. Since it's permanent, it doesn't require a constant energy drain, so even if I did deplete myself too far, I'd just pass out." He frowned. "You, on the other hand, are going to be in the same state as the boys soon."

"He's right," Bulma gasped, struggling towards them with a handful of capsules as the plane bucked and tossed. "You have to unfuse now!"

"I can't," Gogeta protested. "Not until the thirty minutes is up. It's simply not possible until then. Even under normal circumstances, you just have to wait it out."

"Guys!" Yamcha yelled over his shoulder. "We can't keep this up--these guys are as fast as the plane! I'm going to take us down! Hang on!"

Bulma handed a capsule to Pikurin and Kaiobito, and three to Gogeta. "Space suits! Put them on!"

She opened her own capsule, which popped into a space suit, and struggled into it.

"Bulma, hurry it up back there!" There was a trace of panic in Yamcha's voice. "These guys are gonna destroy us!" The plane rolled again, hampering Gogeta's efforts (aided by Pikurin) to get the boys into their space suits.

There was a horrendous screech of metal, and suddenly the plane went into a spin. "Shit! SHIT!" Yamcha yelled. "They got one of our wings! I can't control this thing--we're going to have to land now. We --"

Whatever else he was going to say was cut off as the plane slammed into the hull of the spaceship. It was a Capsule product, and that meant well-made and built to last; also, its considerable momentum turned it into a steel bullet penetrating the skin of the much larger craft. They slammed through layers of bulkheads and burst out into a wide corridor, still hurtling at a tremendous speed. Yamcha tried to fire the retro-rockets to slow them down, but none of the controls responded. They tore through or bounced off a few more walls, losing speed each time, and finally skidded to a stop.

There was a short silence and then Kaiobito said, "Is everyone all right?"

Murmurs of assent followed. Pikurin had shielded Bulma, while Gogeta protected the boys, and Yamcha was strapped into his seat harness--which he was now frantically unbuckling.

"We have to get out of here now!" he shouted to the others, drawing his sword. "Those spiders will be right behind us, and I'm not kidding when I tell you they're huge!"

"Put a spacesuit on," Bulma said, throwing him a capsule. He hastily complied, buckling his sword belt on over the suit.

The door of the ship would not open, but Gogeta braced himself and forced it back, peeling the metal like the skin of a fruit. He jumped down and turned to help Bulma, who was carrying Trunks, and then Kaiobito with Goten. Pikurin and Yamcha followed.

The small group stood looking around them. They were in a huge utility corridor of some kind, at least 50 feet from floor to ceiling, with bundles of wires and cables strung along the inside of it. A path of devastation marked the way their plane had come in.

"I can't believe we survived that," Bulma breathed. "You did good work, Daddy. I hope I get a chance to tell you ..."

The sudden clang of metal-on-metal echoed down the corridor.

"They're comin'," Yamcha said, gripping his sword.

Through one of the holes that their ship had punched in the corridor, the first spider appeared. Of them all, only Yamcha had had a chance so far to see the big variety, and he was as frozen as the rest of them, for it was one thing to see them on the plane's sensor screens but quite another to have one standing not 200 yards away. Then a second appeared behind the first, and a third. They were built on the same plan as the little spiders, but more heavily constructed, with what appeared to be armor shielding their bodies and their much thicker legs. Each spider's body, with its single glowing red eye, hung about 15 feet off the ground, supported by its four massive legs.

Gogeta crouched and held his hands to the side of his body. "Big Bang Ka ... me ..."

"Don't!" Kaiobito protested. "That's your life you're using up! The more energy you burn, the quicker you'll die!"

Gogeta ignored him. ".. ha ... me ... HAAAAA!!!"

The beam of light speared from his gloved hands, much weaker than either a usual Big Bang or Kamehameha, but still powerful, and exploded against the spiders. When the smoke cleared, all that was left was bits and pieces of spider legs and bodies.

"Yes!" Bulma cheered, then looked worriedly at Gogeta, but he seemed fine.

Kaiobito turned on Gogeta. "Don't do that again! Don't you understand? You'll kill yourself."

Gogeta looked down at the god. "What good will it do me to save my life energy if we all get killed by something else first?"

"Don't argue. We don't have time," Bulma protested, cradling Trunks's small, spacesuit-clad body.

"You're right. I --" Gogeta broke off, and cocked his head to one side.

"What is it?"

"I don't know. I just felt ... a ki source on the ship."

"What? Where?" Bulma spun around.

"Do any of you feel anything?" Gogeta asked Kaiobito and Pikurin.

The god shook his head, then hesitated. "Wait, I ... did feel something just then, I think."

"You're right," Pikurin said. "There's something alive on the ship. But our ki sense is still so weak ... I can't pinpoint it, or pin it down."

Gogeta concentrated, then shook his head in frustration. "Damn it. I just lost it again."

"I should have brought the ki radar," Bulma said, then her eyes widened. "Oh, I'm being stupid! I'll just make another one. Yamcha, take Trunks."

"Hey, wait," Yamcha protested as she shoved the unconscious boy into his arms. "Do we have time?"

"It'll hardly take a minute, if I can find something to work with." She vanished into the crippled Capsule ship, while the others waited nervously in the corridor, looking around them.

"Something's gonna show up to investigate that crash site," Gogeta said. "We oughta get out of here."

"Say ... what's that?" Kaiobito pointed towards the ceiling with his free hand.

Everyone crouched at his words, and looked up.

"I don't see anything," Pikurin said.

"I saw something move up there."

"Wait ... he's right!" Yamcha cried. "I just saw something fly across the opening in the wall. It's small. No, wait, there's more than one!"

Now that they were looking intently, they all could see what he was talking about. A dozen or so ovoid shapes, each about a foot long, were darting around above them. None appeared to have any appendages of any sort, and they didn't come close to the Z-fighters, but merely hovered and zipped about in the air.

"You know what those look like ..." Kaiobito murmured.

"Monitoring devices of some kind," Bulma said behind them.

She was kneeling in the doorway of the ZX-72 with her hands full of electrical components. After glancing up to see what they were talking about, she'd gone back to her work.

"You think something's watching us?" Gogeta said.

"Something or someone." Bulma continued working as she spoke. "Those are definitely monitors; I can't think what else they could possibly be, since they don't have any visible weapons."

"Then they know we're here, and we'd better get out of here," Pikurin said.

"C'mon, just a minute. Okay, here." Bulma held up a scanner from the ship, with loops of wire dangling from it. "It's not pretty and we'll have to use these wires to tune it, but it's definitely picking up some sort of ki."

"Can you tell what kind of ki?" Gogeta asked her.

Bulma shook her head. "No. It's not that sensitive. All I can tell is that there's one ... no, wait. Two separate ki's in different parts of the ship. One is very strong. That must be the one you felt. The other is so weak I can hardly pick it up."

"How far away?"

"I can't tell exactly. I can only tell what direction they're in. The weak ki might only be reading that way because it's very far away or behind a lot of shielding."

"Come on, guys, let's move it," Yamcha said, staring up at the circling monitors overhead, or whatever they were. More had joined the first bunch, and it was impossible to count them now.

Bulma pulled out another capsule and tossed it as it expanded into a large armored car. When the others looked at her, she said, "What? Did you think we were going to explore a twenty-mile-long spaceship on foot? You don't have to be a genius to see what a bad idea that would be."

Gogeta tried capsulizing the ZX-72, but that mechanism, along with almost everything else, had been broken in the crash. "I guess we have to leave it here. We'll have to find another way to get out of this ship."

Yamcha and Kaiobito laid the sleeping boys down carefully in the back of the car, and Bulma took the driver's seat and turned to Gogeta. "Well, you're the expert, I suppose. Which way do we go?"

He didn't hesitate, but pointed. "That way."

"What's that way?" Bulma put the car in gear.

"It just feels right." He gave her a goofy, Son Goku grin. Bulma winced.

"Two Saiyajin egos, but only one brain," she sighed. "Well, my radar says that the weaker ki source is more-or-less in that direction, so we may as well go that way. At least we can find out who or what it is."

The car drove off.

Overhead, the cloud of machines split up, with several following the car while the rest hovered around the ZX-72, scanning it up and down and transmitting information. Bulma had been correct about their function. And in a different part of the ship, the information was sifted and catalogued, and a voice began to laugh softly.

"Well, well. What an amazing thing, that one with the Gift should chance to come here, and at this particular time too. This is very interesting. We will have to be careful."


	12. Operation Save-The-Earth Begins

About two hours after Tenshinhan and Chaotzu sealed themselves in the old mine shaft, they emerged by a different exit, on a different face of the mountain. Both were filthy from crawling through narrow tunnels, and a couple of times they'd hit a dead end and had to backtrack. In several cases, too, they'd hit tunnels through which only Chaotzu could pass, but he refused to go without his bigger friend, so they'd had to find a way around.

The ruddy light of afternoon spilled into the tunnel through a partly-overgrown opening, looking wonderful to both of them after hours in darkness. Tenshinhan stopped Chaotzu with one outstretched hand and cautiously approached the opening, peering out. They had come much lower on the mountain's flank, and the area around the mine shaft was overgrown with the low, thorny bushes that grew in this dry part of the world. He saw no spiders in their immediate vicinity, but groups of them were flying overhead, their darting black shapes making him think of flies buzzing in the afternoon sky.

"I don't think they're actively hunting us," Tenshinhan said softly after a moment. "They're just flying around looking for anything that moves. Look." One of the spiders peeled off suddenly from its comrades and darted downward towards a mountain goat on the rocks below. The terrified animal sprinted for cover, but was not fast enough; one of the spider's lance-like legs pierced its back. The goat writhed and screamed in pain until the spider finished it off. Then it flew back to join the others.

The soft-hearted Chaotzu had covered his face in horror. "That's awful ... they just kill for the fun of it."

"I don't think it's fun, exactly," Tenshinhan murmured. "More like business. They don't seem to have any emotions at all. They're just machines."

Looking across the rocks below them, he saw the bodies of numerous other animals that had been killed and abandoned. Tenshinhan wondered why the spiders had not been doing that earlier--they had pursued himself and Chaotzu, but left the animals alone. Their goals must have changed, and he didn't like it at all. They didn't seem to use the dead bodies for anything. They just killed and then moved on.

"What should we do?" Chaotzu asked softly.

Tenshinhan shook himself back to reality. "We should get back to Lunch and find out how she's doing."

The current home of the nomadic trio was an abandoned bandit hideout, not too different from the one where Yamcha and Pu'ar had once lived. Tenshinhan had left Lunch barricaded inside, under strict orders not to leave, while he and Chaotzu went to investigate the falling "meteors." Actually, he'd tried to make Chaotzu stay behind as well, but his friend refused to leave him.

Lunch had been a brunette at the time, which meant that she'd been terrified of the strange lights in the sky and obedient to his instructions to stay behind. If she'd sneezed since then, though, there was absolutely no telling where she might be now.

Sometimes it was like living with a 2-year-old ... a 2-year-old with an arsenal of assault weapons.

"I can check on her," Chaotzu offered. He reached out with his limited telepathic abilities, seeking Lunch's familiar mind. It had been a long time since he'd relied on his own skills--normally Tenshinhan was so much more powerful that he allowed his bigger friend to take the lead in almost everything. Tenshinhan's ki-sense could keep tabs on Lunch; Tenshinhan's powers would protect them. But now, the tables were turned in a very strange way. Tenshinhan was still physically superior, but Chaotzu was the only one who possessed extrasensory abilities.

Chaotzu's eyes snapped open. "Uh-oh."

Tenshinhan's eyes narrowed--all three of them. "What do you mean?"

"She's changed into ... the other Lunch. She said that she's out looking for us. She wants to know where we are."

"Well, don't tell her! Tell her to go back home. We'll meet her there."

"I don't know if that's a good idea," Chaotzu deferred. "She'd probably be safer with us than traveling through the ... uh-oh. Oh ... never mind."

"What?"

"She said a spider just spotted her, but she shot it."

"She what? That idiot ... she'll have them all on her back before she figures out what she's doing."

Chaotzu picked his words carefully. "You know ... blond-haired Lunch can probably defend herself about as well as you or I, right now."

"That's not the point. She shouldn't be out here. She may be aggressive, but she doesn't have any experience fighting. She's overconfident--she'll underestimate her enemy and get killed." Tenshinhan sighed. "Ask her where she is."

Chaotzu did so. "She says she's not sure. She's in a ravine ... probably a few miles from the hideout. She says there are a lot of spiders above her."

"In a ravine. Well, most of the ravines around here are tributaries of the same water system," Tenshinhan mused. "Tell her to go down the ravine--downhill, that is, away from the mountains. If we can find a drywash or something around here, it will probably lead us to the main canyon system, and we can meet her there. It'll keep her out of sight of the spiders."

Chaotzu relayed this information. "She says she wants to fight."

"Tell her to stay low! Blast it ..."

Tenshinhan looked around, seeking the dark shadow of a streambed among the rocks that might lead into the valley's alluvial drainage system.

"There. Chaotzu, what did she say?"

Chaotzu smiled. "She said that you'd better let her shoot a few spiders before we go home, but she's not trying to attack them now."

"Good. Let's go."

They left the safety of the cave mouth and moved swiftly among the rocks, staying low. Soon they reached the nearest ravine that Tenshinhan's sharp vision had spotted, a narrow cleft in the arid landscape. In the rainy season it would be a treacherous, raging cataract, but at this time of year, the streambed was dry. Tenshinhan slid down the rough bank, with Chaotzu floating at his shoulder. He relaxed somewhat once they were hidden from the spiders.

The two of them followed the dry watercourse, Tenshinhan alternating between walking and jogging, while Chaotzu kept pace. In due course they entered a larger canyon, and there, sitting on her hovercycle and waiting for them, was Lunch. She was wearing leather motorcyclists' gear, and her face was smudged with dirt. A gun almost as big as she was rested against her thigh.

"Hey boys!" she grinned. "Need a ride?"

"What are you doing out here?" Tenshinhan demanded. "Didn't I specifically tell you to stay at home?"

Lunch snorted. "You told the other me. Maybe she's happy to be your little housewife, but I'm certainly not. Figured you boys couldn't handle yourselves."

"We were doing just fine," Tenshinhan retorted.

"Oh yeah, getting trapped and killed by spiders is sure _my_ idea of a good time." Lunch patted the seat behind her. "Get on. You may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but my kid needs a dad."

"Your ... uh, your what?" Tenshinhan asked, climbing on behind her and wondering what game she was playing now.

"My kid. Our kid." Lunch looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes mischievous and bright. "That's what I really came out here to tell you. Last time we went through a town, I picked up a capsule home pregnancy test, just in case. Well, I've suspected for a while, but now I know for sure. You're a daddy, big boy."

Tenshinhan fell off the hovercycle.

"Tenshinhan!" Chaotzu flew down to help his friend. "Are you all right?"

"I ... I'm not quite sure," Tenshinhan mumbled, staring at Lunch. "Are you positive?"

Lunch nodded.

Chaotzu cried out with joy and hugged his big friend around the neck. "That's wonderful!"

"Yes, don't you think that's wonderful, Tenshinhan?" Lunch inquired, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

"Uh ... yes ... yes it is ... I think ..." Still stunned, he got back onto the hovercycle behind her.

"You don't sound happy."

"I'm a bit shocked! News like that will do that to a guy!"

Lunch revved the engine. "Well, you'd better be happy, that's all I've got to say about that. And if we stand here talking any longer, we'll be spider food."

"Take us home," Tenshinhan told her. "We can try to formulate a plan and see if we can contact any of the others."

Lunch looked over her shoulder at the two of them. "What about Chaotzu? Can't he talk to them?"

Chaotzu shook his head. "I don't have much range at all, unless I know somebody really well." He was ashamed to admit it, but he had been neglecting his own training badly. He could probably have enhanced his psychic abilities to great heights ... but with the Z-senshi always around, it never seemed necessary to spend the time. Inwardly, he vowed that if they got out of this alive, he'd start relying more on himself, and less on the powers of others.

"Which way should I go?" Lunch asked, kicking the bike into gear.

Tenshinhan looked around. "Which ravine did you come out of?"

Lunch pointed.

"Okay. Take us back that way; it'll be the quickest way to the hideout. And driiiiiiiiii--" His voice changed to a hoarse yell as she slammed forward, rocketing off a boulder and careening into the ravine.

"--drive carefully!" Tenshinhan protested as the hovercycle bounded over the rocks. "Your baby --"

"Oh, I can tell the next eight months are going to be a joy," Lunch griped. "Maybe I shouldn't have told you yet."

Chaotzu hung onto Tenshinhan's arm to keep from being knocked off the back of the hovercycle. "I wonder how many eyes it'll have," he mused, delighted.

"I wonder what'll happen when it sneezes," Tenshinhan muttered, frowning as he tried to imagine a toddler with Lunch's blond personality.

"I wonder why I bothered rescuing you two," Lunch grumbled.

They whipped around a corner on the hovercycle--and there, not fifty yards in front of them, were at least a dozen spiders, on the ground in the ravine.

"Crap!" Lunch yelled, skidding to a halt.

Too late, Tenshinhan realized that he had made a very, very bad mistake. The spiders who had originally become aware of Lunch's presence had not given up looking for her--and now the three of them had driven straight into the patrol.

The spiders all turned and oriented on the hovercycle and its passengers. Lunch shouldered her gun and fired into the middle of them. A cloud of smoke and dust blossomed skyward.

"Oh--great!" Tenshinhan snapped. "Now they all know where we are!"

"Hey, you want to do it, macho man?" Lunch retorted, shoving the gun into his hands.

Several spiders emerged from the dust cloud, rose into the air and shot towards them. Lunch, her hands now free to drive, fishtailed the hovercycle around and headed back the way they'd come.

Tenshinhan tried to aim the gun on the bouncing hovercycle, but he was afraid that he'd pull the trigger at the wrong moment and accidentally blow Chaotzu's head off. He'd been a martial artist all his life--he had never fired a gun before, and he suspected that if he actually managed to hit a spider, it would only be by sheer luck.

Chaotzu concentrated, and one of the spiders dissolved into a fireball in midair, temporarily distracting the others.

"Yes! Chaotzu!" Lunch cheered, waving her arms in the air. The hovercycle started to go into a spin.

"Hands on the controls!" Tenshinhan yelled, and Lunch grabbed the handlebars and kept them from tipping over. "Don't do that," he muttered as she straightened out the vehicle.

"Oh, bite me." Lunch crouched over the handlebars, and then choked on the dust kicked up by the tires--the dust cloud they'd raised going the other way. Tenshinhan realized what was happening a moment too late to do anything about it.

"No! Lunch! Don't ... breathe it in," he finished, as she sneezed. The blond cascade of hair flying in his face suddenly rippled dark as night, and Lunch gave a tiny shriek and lost control of the hovercycle. It skidded onto its side, flinging them all off. The spiders, not expecting this, overshot them and went racing down the ravine, only to brake themselves against the far canyon wall.

Tenshinhan picked himself up. Lunch had landed on top of him; she was trembling in terror, but seemed unharmed. Chaotzu had landed against a boulder a little farther on. The gun lay in pieces among the rocks, but the hovercycle seemed to be intact.

"Lunch! Chaotzu! Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, but ... but ..." Lunch looked up at the spiders bearing down on them. "Eeek!" she shrieked, trying to hide behind Tenshinhan.

The spider zeroing in on the two of them blew apart, its metal pieces flying against the canyon walls. "Ha ... that'll show you," Chaotzu gasped, staggering to his feet.

"Lunch--get Chaotzu!" Tenshinhan cried, dragging the hovercycle upright. Lunch nodded and ran to pick up the short man. Tenshinhan stared at the hovercycle's controls--he'd watched Lunch operate it dozens of times; surely it couldn't be that hard ...

"Here ... I can do it ..." Lunch offered shyly, nudging against him. She was holding Chaotzu clasped against her chest. Blood was trickling down one of his arms, and he was gripping his side.

"Chaotzu --"

"I'm fine. Don't worry about me. We have to get out of here."

Several spiders were hovering above them now, and more were swooping in from the sky to join them.

"Lunch ... sorry about this ..." Tenshinhan bent down and picked up a handful of dust. "We need you the other way now ..." He flung it into her face. Lunch coughed, and sneezed. Her hair turned gold, and she dropped Chaotzu. Tenshinhan lunged to catch him, and received a punch in the face from Lunch that almost knocked him down.

"What are you thinking, making us crash like that?" She grabbed the hovercycle's handlebars and started the engine.

The spiders seemed to come to some kind of collective realization that their prey was about to escape, and dove in a mass. Chaotzu stiffened with concentration, and the creatures scattered as they were knocked back by an invisible shield.

"I can't ... keep doing that ..." he gasped.

"How bad are you hurt?" Tenshinhan asked, holding him protectively as he got back onto the hovercycle.

"I think some ribs are broken ... it's not that bad, but--Look out, here they come again!"

Lunch gunned the motor and they burst forward, easily eluding the spiders. The cycle skidding into the main canyon. Lunch pivoted and headed downhill, away from the mountains.

"No, go the other way!" Tenshinhan yelled, but looking back and seeing the cloud of spiders rising behind them, he realized that their way back to the possible safety of the mineshafts was now sealed off.

They rocketed down the canyon, several times coming within inches of violent, fiery death as Lunch expertly guided the vehicle around the twists and turns. A few of the spiders were not so lucky, and plowed into the canyon walls with small explosions. Suddenly the ground dropped away beneath them, as the canyon they were following met a much larger canyon. In the rainy season this would be a waterfall--now, it was a cliff, with a ribbon of whitewater foaming at the bottom.

"Hold on!" Lunch yelled as the hovercycle bounded over the lip. For a moment they seemed to hover in midair; then the bottom fell out of Tenshinhan's stomach as they plummeted. He clung to Chaotzu with one arm and Lunch with the other. The wind roared in his ears. They hit the water as if smacking into concrete, but the hoverjets took most of the impact of their fall, and the hovercycle, its metal structure groaning from the strain, leapt forward with a rooster tail of water rearing up behind it.

"Yaaaahhhhh!" Lunch screamed in excitement.

 _We may survive the spiders, but I don't know if I'm going to survive my girlfriend,_ Tenshinhan thought, hanging on for dear life as they tore down the narrow river, careering over sandbars and narrowly avoiding logjams and boulders jutting up from the water's frothing surface. Glancing behind him, he saw that they were still being pursued.

"Oh ... that's not good," Lunch yelled suddenly. Tenshinhan looked forward and saw that they were heading straight for what appeared to be--solid rock. At some point in the past, an avalanche had blocked the canyon, creating a lake behind a mountain of rubble. The water had forced its way through the obstacle, and now they could see that the river ended in a snarling mass of whitewater at the base of a heap of house-sized boulders. Presumably, it had found a channel under or through the blockage.

There wasn't time to turn around.

"Hold your breath!" Lunch yelled, the wind catching her words and tearing them away from her mouth. She forced the handlebars downward and they broke the surface of the water in a massive explosion of spray.

For a split second Tenshinhan thought she'd lost her mind and meant to take them under the natural dam. Then he realized her plan, and it was a good one--to use the dragging effect of the water to slow them enough to stop before they hit the rocks. Unfortunately, as soon as they were underwater, the engine died and they completely lost all ability to brake, accelerate or steer. The river's powerful undertow caught hold of the group and dragged them towards the rocks.

 _Lunch ... Chaotzu ... I'm sorry, I've failed you ..._ Tenshinhan thought, struggling to hold onto them both as the river's current sucked them under. They were battered against the rocks like a cork churning in a shaken bottle--but they rebounded off; they were not smashed, and that was because they were still moving, there was still someplace to go. For a moment it was pitch black and Tenshinhan completely lost track of right and left, up and down. Then they popped to the surface of the water, bruised and half-stunned and half-drowned, all of them coughing and gasping, and Tenshinhan trying to blink the water out of all three of his eyes.

Once he recovered his presence of mind enough to tread water, holding onto Chaotzu with one arm, Tenshinhan realized that they were floating along in a relatively gentle current. The river here was smooth. He looked back at the mound of ancient rubble that had blocked the water's flow ... and then forward, and his jaw clenched. The walls of the canyon were sheer. There was no way that he could see to climb out. At least they appeared to have lost their pursuit. Tenshinhan tread water slowly, conserving his energy. Chaotzu was limp against him, but was breathing.

Lunch paddled easily at his side, coughing and sneezing as she tried to clear from her lungs and sinuses the water she'd accidentally inhaled. She flickered back and forth between her blond and dark-haired forms.

"Are you all right?" he asked her anxiously.

"Do I frikkin' LOOK all right, you--*SNEEZE* oh, Tenshinhan, thank goodness you're all right! I was so worried--*SNEEZE* and if you ever, ever, ever take me anywhere near water again, I don't know what I'll do to you, Tenshinhan, you piece of--*SNEEZE* ... Chaotzu! Is Chaotzu all right? I was so worried when I saw him get knocked into that--*SNEEZE* I'm freezing to death goddammit! When I see one of those spiders I'll wring its fuckin' neck!--*SNEEZE* ..."

... and so on. When the sneezing fit eventually ended, the wet hair plastered around her pretty face was dark, for which Tenshinhan was privately grateful.

"Lunch, are you all right?" he asked anxiously. "You don't think ... that the baby ..."

Lunch smiled weakly and shook her head. "I'm not very far along yet. I don't think that getting bounced around a little bit will hurt me." She looked around. "Do you think the spiders are gone?"

"I think we lost them pretty good back there." Any human would have easily figured out where the three refugees would surface, but the spiders didn't seem to have that kind of reasoning capacity.

The only thing he didn't know was how they were going to get out of the water. As the current carried them on, the water was starting to get choppy and rough again. He wondered how long they could swim, and how long it would be before they hit another stretch of whitewater. Glancing sideways at Lunch, he saw her looking around in interest at their surroundings, admiring the bright colors in the banded sandstone cliffs to either side. She didn't seem to have realized their new peril and he decided not to say anything yet.

"Chaotzu?" Tenshinhan carefully shifted his grip on his friend. Chaotzu was still unconscious. Tenshinhan felt for a pulse (relying on his powerful legs to keep them from sinking) and found that it was weak and rapid. Chaotzu had probably been hurt worse in the hovercycle crash than he'd let on. "Just like him ..." Tenshinhan muttered, gritting his teeth.

The current swept them around a bend in the river. Tenshinhan braced himself to herd Lunch towards the side if it turned out that they were heading into whitewater, but instead, what he saw completely amazed him.

A house.

It was built in a natural hollow in the cliff face, where the rock appeared to have been worn away by an old bend of the river at some point in the past when the river's bed was much higher than it was today. Now, the sandstone was carved into a natural overhang that would have made the dwelling completely invisible from the air, and the high-water marks on the walls of the canyon ended just below the ledge where the house was built. It was quite elaborate, made mostly from mortared sandstone, but with a few modern-looking domes and additions. A ladder led down from the ledge to the water, where a small boat bobbed alongside a floating dock.

"Lunch! Swim that way!" The current was already carrying them past the house. The two swimmers stroked out for the dock. Tenshinhan grabbed onto it, and hoisted the waterlogged Chaotzu to safety.

"Tenshinhan --!" Lunch, who was not as strong, couldn't fight the current. She was being carried away. Tenshinhan pushed off from the dock and grabbed one of her hands. He towed her back with him, using all his strength to fight against the force of the water. When they finally reached the dock, he was so exhausted that he had to cling to the side and breathe heavily for a few minutes while Lunch pulled herself up beside Chaotzu. Then she reached a hand down to help Tenshinhan get out of the water.

When they had recovered their breath and Tenshinhan had checked on Chaotzu, Lunch asked, "What is this place?"

"I don't know." Tenshinhan looked around. It was a bizarre mixture of new technology and old--the dock itself was nothing more than a wooden plank that used a few empty plastic ten-gallon water jugs as flotation devices, but the boat was very new-looking with a modern electric motor. The ladder leading up to the next level was simple metal pipe bolted to the rock.

"Ready to climb?" Tenshinhan asked, turning to Lunch--only to see her staring in shock at the top of the ladder. Tenshinhan's head snapped up. A dark figure had appeared above them, standing on the edge and looking down. Its hair fluttered in the wind down the canyon.

Tenshinhan stiffened.

"Oh, it's only a teenage boy," Lunch said in surprise. "What's a boy doing out here in the middle of nowhere by himself?"

It wasn't a boy. Tenshinhan didn't trust himself to speak. He wondered if they should just jump back into the water--if they even had time to try something so desperate.

The person at the top of the ladder was Seventeen.

"Lunch," Tenshinhan said softly. "Don't move."

Lunch looked at him without comprehension. "Why? He's just a kid."

Come to think of it, Tenshinhan recalled ... Vegeta's wish to Porunga to restore the Earth had included the instruction that no evil people should be brought back. The fact that the wish had gone ahead and worked on Vegeta himself had delighted Bulma and Goku to no end ... and, Tenshinhan mused, perhaps since Seventeen had been restored, the android had changed just as his sister had.

But ... could the androids be considered evil at all? Even in Future Trunks's time, they seemed not so much malicious as just completely incapable of understanding or empathizing with human life. They killed and played with humans as a boy might play with a captured wild bird without understanding that he was causing it harm. Tenshinhan looked up into Seventeen's pale ice-blue eyes and saw nothing remotely human or sympathetic. Eighteen had regained at least some of her lost humanity through her husband and child ... but no one had seen her brother since he was restored to life and vanished into the wilderness.

Now, it seemed, Tenshinhan and his friends were the first to make contact again. How had the years changed Seventeen--for good, for ill, or not at all? Tenshinhan looked up at Seventeen, who looked back down at them, immobile as a statue.

 

* * *

 

After the ZX-72 flew off into the night sky, the defenders of Earth grouped in the lab to strategize. Mrs. Briefs brought them dinner ("Nobody saves the world on an empty stomach") and while they ate, Gohan and Dr. Briefs sketched plans on napkins and sheets of graph paper, mumbling about wavelengths and cosines. Videl tried peering over their shoulders, but she couldn't understand what they were drawing, so eventually she wandered off to stare at the screens while she sipped her coffee. She wondered where her father was, but realized that she wasn't terribly worried--concerned, but not worried. Her father seemed to lead a charmed life. If anybody could get through this crisis unharmed, it was him.

Eighteen joined her, carrying a sleeping Marron in the crook of one arm. Her augmented strength gave her one advantage that human mothers didn't have: she could carry Marron indefinitely without fatiguing.

Videl smiled at her, a bit shyly; Eighteen glanced at her and then looked at the screens without saying anything. Videl gulped. Eighteen intimidated her--in fact, most of Gohan's friends intimidated her. They were all either famous (like Goku) or much older than herself (like Kuririn) or just plain unfriendly (like Piccolo, Eighteen, and Vegeta). In fact, the only one who didn't scare her was Bulma, and even Bulma was scary sometimes. She wondered how Gohan could deal with all these strange people without batting an eye. Well, he'd had a lot of practice.

"--in the western sky?" Eighteen was saying.

Videl realized that the other woman had been talking, and was now looking at her as if some kind of a response was required. She opened and closed her mouth nervously.

"Well?" Eighteen snapped. "Did you or didn't you?"

"Uh ... what?" Videl stammered.

Eighteen rolled her eyes. "That glow in the western sky. Did you notice how long it's been there?"

"What glow?" Videl asked, realizing that she sounded like an idiot. Eighteen huffed, and pointed to one of the screens. She was right: there was a glow in the sky above the city. It stood out because so many of the normal city lights were dark.

"What's that?" Videl said, leaning closer. "It looks like fire."

"That's exactly what it is," Eighteen said grimly. "I assume you haven't been standing here long enough to notice how quickly it's grown. Or if you have been, you obviously weren't paying attention."

"... I guess not," Videl said in a small voice, wishing Gohan would come rescue her. To her surprise, he did.

"Hey, you guys," Gohan said cheerfully, stepping up behind them. "C'mon over here. We're discussing strategy."

"I thought you were discussing parallel circuits and broadcast frequencies," Eighteen said shortly.

Gohan just smiled, shrugged and led the way back to where the others were grouped around a table with a map spread out on it. Looking at the map, Videl recognized it as a recent Briefs invention. The map was thin enough to be folded, but touch-sensitive and the user could scroll around or zoom in on particular areas. At the moment, it was zoomed out, showing the whole world.

Everyone looked expectantly at Gohan.

"Um," he said, suddenly self-conscious. "Uh ... we're here." He used a stylus to touch a point on the map, causing it to light up with a glowing purple dot.

"We know that," Eighteen said, jiggling Marron, who had begun to fuss.

Gohan blushed slightly. Videl was gratified to see that she wasn't the only one who was intimidated by Kuririn's brusque wife. "Uh, right. Now here's where Bulma-san's ki detector, which is similar in nature to Saiyajin scouters, shows a ki that should be Tenshinhan and Chaotzu. It's too high to be anyone else."

"In the middle of nowhere," Master Roshi remarked. "As usual."

Gohan nodded. "They may be in trouble. One of our first priorities should be sending someone out to retrieve them. The other thing we need to do is field-test our spider-deactivating system. Before we go building something large-scale, we need to make sure that it actually works. Any fine-tuning needs to be done at this stage. So ..." He looked around. "We need some volunteers."

"Father and I can go in our ship," Chi-Chi said. In the calm that sometimes overtakes people in a crisis, even she had accepted Gohan as the group's leader, in the absence of Goku, Vegeta or any of the other people who normally took charge.

"I should be with the group who's testing the spider-deactivator," Gohan said. He chewed his thumbnail thoughtfully until Chi-Chi smacked his hand. He winced and withdrew it. His newfound authority only went so far.

"Why?" Videl asked.

"Because I know how it works. Dr. Briefs can stay here to make more of them, and try to rig up a system to broadcast it over a wide area."

"How would you do that?" Eighteen said, showing a bit of interest.

"The problem," Gohan explained, "is that the broadcast device has to produce several frequencies at once. Some of them are easily blocked by objects in the environment and even by the atmosphere itself, so it doesn't carry very far. It would carry much farther in space and I suspect that's where it's meant to operate. The more power we can supply to the broadcaster, the more distance we can get from our signal. I'm thinking that radio and TV stations would be perfect ... actually, the ideal situation would be to use the communications satellites, but it looks like most of them aren't functioning. First, we need to experiment and see how well it works on actual spiders, not just the one we have in the lab." He gestured at the still metal carcass half-dismantled on an examining table. Everyone took an automatic step away from it.

"Well, how about this," Master Roshi said after a moment. "Eighteen and I can go pick up Tenshinhan and Chaotzu in one of the capsule ships--" he leered at Eighteen, who glared at him "--while Gohan, you'll try out that gizmo of yours."

"What about me?" Videl asked.

"You can come with me," Gohan offered. "I'll need someone to help me with the, you know, the testing and all."

"Unchaperoned? I think not!" Chi-Chi snapped. "We'll take Father's plane."

Gohan winced. Obviously being trapped in a small space with his girlfriend, mother and grandfather was not an ideal situation for him.

"What about my father?" Videl asked hesitantly. "I haven't seen him since all of this began. Does that machine show where he is?" She nodded towards the ki detector.

"I--I don't know, Videl," Gohan said. "If it does, only Bulma knows. The only ki's that I can readily identify are Tenshinhan and Chaotzu. Everyone else, all the normal humans, kind of run together." He smiled and patted her arm. "He's probably with Buu, and safe. The detector doesn't show Buu, either."

"I hope we find him," Videl said sadly. "If I go with you, can we look for him?"

"Of course we can."

"Let's move!" Eighteen said sharply. She handed Marron to Mrs. Briefs with gentleness not suggested by her rough words.

"Lead on," Master Roshi leered.

"Oh, you're not going with me. Someone's got to stay here who knows how to fight--to protect them." She gestured at the Briefs.

Ultimately, it was decided that Chi-Chi, Gohan and Videl would take one plane, while Eighteen went alone in another to pick up Tenshinhan and Chaotzu. Master Roshi and Gyu-Mao would stay with the Briefs at the lab, while Dr. Briefs continued to refine the spider deactivators; he and Gohan would stay in touch via radio and work together to develop a long-range system.

"Good luck, everyone!" Mrs. Briefs cried, waving.

"We'll need it," Gohan muttered under his breath as they parted ways.

With Videl flying Chi-Chi's plane, they soared up into the night sky. The first thing Gohan noticed was that the ominous red glow was _much_ more noticeable outside. Either that, or it was getting bigger quickly. Or nearer.

"Let's go over and take a look at that first," he suggested to Videl, then noticed her look of shock and horror, and followed her eyes. She was looking down into the yard of the Capsule Corp. buildings. Capsule Corp. was one of the only buildings in the immediate vicinity whose lights had not gone out; it had its own power supply, so its roof and grounds were lit with floodlights. By that light, Videl and Gohan could see that the Briefs' pets had been slaughtered, the bodies strewn around in a horrific display of carnage.

Gohan looked to make sure that his mother hadn't seen it. Chi-Chi was making tea in the back, and Gohan quickly gestured to Videl to take the plane higher.

Videl had seen his glance, and she lowered her voice so that Chi-Chi couldn't hear. "They left the animals alone before. What are they doing now?"

"I don't know," Gohan whispered. "But I don't like it at all. We've got to find some spiders and test this thing on them."

Chi-Chi popped up between them, acting in her self-appointed chaperone role. "Tea? It calms the nerves."

Gohan smiled nervously and accepted a cup. "Videl, see if you can find some spiders."

"That's weird," Videl said, flying over the mostly darkened city. "There don't seem to be any around."

"Probably because this part of the city's been evacuated," Gohan said. "Try over there." He pointed towards the glow in the sky, where they could also see small explosions.

As they flew nearer, all conversation ceased. It was indeed a fire ... a huge fire. The glow was reflecting not from clouds, but from smoke. On the ground, a sheet of flame seemed to march on towards the horizon.

"Oh, Gohan," Videl whispered. "It's like the whole world is on fire. I hope my father is all right ..."

"Spiders," Gohan whispered, pointing.

They'd found the spiders as well as what was left of the army. Near the forefront of the flames, the remnants of the army were pinned down by an uncountable mass of spiders. From the air, the red lights of the spiders' sensors glowed like a bed of coals themselves. Though each individual spider was no match for a man with a gun, the great mass of them overwhelmed the defenders, immobilizing tanks and bearing down soldiers with their sheer numbers.

"Gohan, they're gettin' killed!" Chi-Chi shouted at her son. "When are you gonna use that thing?" She pointed at the deactivator.

Gohan gulped. "I wasn't planning on field-testing it on this many. I was hoping for one or two." He drew a deep breath. "But Mom's right. If we don't do something, they'll all die."

He got up and opened the door of the plane. The wind whipped his dark hair back from his face as he leaned out. "Mom, hand me the deactivator."

"Gohan, be careful!" Videl cried.

"I'm as safe as the rest of us," Gohan said. "Videl, listen. I don't know what the range on this thing is going to turn out to be, and I don't have any idea how long it'll take to affect them either. It was almost instantaneous on the one in the lab, but that was under controlled conditions. If this doesn't work, we're going to have a lot of very angry spiders following us, so be ready to outrun them."

Videl nodded, gripping the controls of the plane in sweat-damp hands.

"Please be careful," Chi-Chi said softly. "With my Goku-san and Goten gone ..." She stopped and swallowed.

Gohan smiled reassuringly at her, and to Videl, he said, "Okay. Take the plane down for a low pass."


	13. Separated

The armored car rumbled on through the corridors of the strange ship. Bulma had turned the driving over to Yamcha, and she had taken out a few of the car's standard sensors (such as its speedometer) and was curled up in the passenger seat, tinkering.

"What are you building?" Pikurin asked her.

Bulma glanced up. "Something to tell us if the air is breathable or not, so we can take off these helmets."

"Say, Pikurin," Gogeta said. "Are you a he, a she or an it, anyhow?"

Pikurin gave him a frosty glance. "That's for me to know and you to _never_ find out."

"Aha!" Bulma sat upright. "Yamcha, stop the car so I can get a good reading."

Yamcha did so, and Bulma leaned out of the vehicle for a moment. "Hmm. It looks like the air is a bit thin here, but acceptable for Earth-type life. Or Namekian life. I think it's safe to take off your helmets--but you should probably keep the suits on, just in case."

They unbuckled their helmets with sighs of relief. Yamcha put the car back in gear, but braked to a halt when they encountered another corridor meeting theirs in a four-way intersection. "Which way?"

Gogeta was the current keeper of Bulma's cobbled-together ki detector. He looked down at it. "Uh, left. No, more like ... straight ahead ... no, more like left ... Bulma, this thing's hard to read, you know. Couldn't you build it a little better, woman?"

"Oh, please. Let me see that." Bulma leaned back over the seat. "Oh, you two aren't as dense as I thought. The ki source off to our left and ahead of us, so you're both right, Vegeta, Son-kun."

"I'm goin' left," Yamcha decided, and turned the car.

In the backseat, the boys were piled onto Kaiobito's lap. Trunks twitched in his sleep and knocked Goten off onto the floor. Both boys woke with a start. "Ow," Goten whined.

"Hey!" Gogeta turned to the kids. "How are you guys?"

"Uh ... confused," Trunks said, sitting up. "Where are we? What happened?"

"You almost died," Pikurin said shortly, and then smiled at them more warmly. "Are you all right? You worried us."

"GAH!" the boys shrieked, recoiling. "What's that?" Trunks demanded, while Goten tried to hide behind him, shoving Kaiobito against the window; it was hard enough fitting that many people in the backseat without two of them being squirming young boys. "Is it an alien?"

"Oh, that's just Pikurin. He's a fusion," Gogeta explained.

"A fusion of _what,_ a deformed freak and a cabbage? Oh ... hold on ..." Trunks leaned forward, staring at Pikurin, who glared back. "Wait ... I kinda remember this, sorta vaguely, from when me'n'Goten were fused ..."

Goten leaned out from behind his best friend, staring wide-eyed. "Hello, weird freaky green alien person."

"Hello yourself ... brat."

"AAAAH!" The cry from Yamcha came at the same time as he yanked the car's controls, pressing the crowded backseat passengers against one side of the car and almost tossing Bulma into his lap.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

"Yeah, watch it up there," Kaiobito muttered, trying to extricate Goten's foot from his ear.

"Spiders," Yamcha said succinctly.

"Oh dear," Pikurin said. "I mean, crap. I mean--WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Uh ... sorry. Didn't mean to let that slip out. There's got to be some way ... I'll distract them while the rest of you escape ..."

Everyone was staring at him/it, except for Yamcha who was fortunately concentrating on driving the car. "Wow, you're pretty schitzo, aren't ya?" Gogeta said.

Pikurin grabbed him by the collar. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT IS TO BE ME? Can you even imagine the conflicting drives that are pushing me in different directions, Son? I think not," he finished, pushing Gogeta away.

"You'd be surprised," Gogeta muttered, looking out the window. "Oh, it's the big ones again!" he cried enthusiastically, seeing the spiders.

"Oh yes, it's the big ones," Yamcha grumbled, putting the car through a series of evasive maneuvers.

"Guns, guns, where are the guns ..." Bulma sorted through her capsule case.

"I'll take care of them," Gogeta said, starting to stand up in the swaying car.

Kaiobito seized his arm. "No you will not or you will _die,_ Goku-san, Vegeta-san!"

Pikurin stared out the window at the spiders. "I think they're more ... following us than actively chasing us. Maybe these ones aren't hostile. And maybe pigs will fly," he muttered to himself. "Oh rats ... I wonder if I just described myself ...?"

An energy beam speared past them, melting a hole in the corridor, which Yamcha veered around.

"... or not," Pikurin murmured.

"Great, just great," Bulma snapped as she hunted through her capsule case. "No wonder they're not trying to _catch_ us--they're just going to _fry_ us --"

The car tore around a corner which unexpectedly ended, not in a dead end but in ... empty air. They soared over the edge into a vast shaft. The car seemed to hang suspended for a moment, then fell.

"Who designed this place, an IDIOT?" Bulma shrieked. "How can they build a spaceship and not invent _warning signs?"_ She scrambled for her capsules, which had been knocked out of her hand and rolled into her lap and under the seat. "Dammit! I know I have a plane here somewhere!"

Gogeta kicked open one of the doors. The wind of their fall whipped his black hair around his face. "We have to fly--there's no choice!"

"Papa, we can't," Trunks protested. "Me an' Goten, we tried when we were fused."

"There's _no choice!"_ Gogeta yelled at the boy. In his fused voice, Goku and Vegeta sounded in perfect agreement. He held out his arms to the kids. "Come on. I'll take you."

The boys hesitated, then as one, they ran forward and jumped onto the man who represented their fused fathers, trusting him utterly.

"NO --" Kaiobito began.

Gogeta, with the boys clinging to his body, reached out and grabbed hold of Bulma. He turned and reached out his hand to Pikurin. "Here, hold onto me and we'll --"

Then the wind sucked him out of the door and he was gone.

"AAARGH!" Pikurin kicked out the other door. "Kaiobito ... Yamcha ... take my hands. Maybe if we pool our ki we can actually manage to fly."

They did so, knowing without speaking that they had only one chance to survive. They were falling so fast that if they hit along with the car, they would be killed immediately.

As one, the three warriors flung themselves from the falling vehicle--and realized that they did not, in fact, have enough ki to fly. They were still falling. The dark wall of the shaft whipped by them.

Yamcha began to scream at the Namekian fusion, the wind tearing the words from his mouth. "Pu--Oolon--Pikurin, transform into something that can fly!"

Pikurin tried to gather his/its fractured thoughts, tried to gather from those parts of it that had been Pu'ar and Oolong the secret of shape-change. Suddenly Yamcha was clinging to a big green kite with antennae. Kaiobito tumbled off with a shriek, then used his (currently limited) teleportation ability to teleport back on.

Pikurin immediately discovered the problem with the shape he'd chosen. "I can't steer!"

The kite spun around, doing several accidental backflips as its unbalanced load caused it to tumble.

"Land somewhere!" Kaiobito yelled, trying to keep from falling off. _First the cloud, and now this,_ he thought grimly. _I really, really hate not being able to fly._

"That would be great if I could--OOOMPH!" The kite had smacked into the wall of the shaft. "Ugh ..." it mumbled, knocked semiconscious.

"Uh ... what's down there?" Yamcha asked, pointing below them, where a glow was becoming evident at the bottom of the shaft. The falling car had already vanished into it. They were still falling towards it, but much more slowly, as the dazed kite looped back and forth.

"I suppose it's possible that the ship has some kind of reactor core, and we're falling into it," Kaiobito suggested helpfully.

"AAAAAUUUGH!" Yamcha grabbed a double handful of kite. "STOP FALLING DAMMIT!"

The kite smacked into another wall, nearly dislodging its passengers. This time it knocked itself out completely--and disintegrated. Suddenly they were falling at full speed again--this time with an unconscious Piccolo, Kuririn, Oolong and Pu'ar.

Yamcha grabbed hold of Kuririn and Pu'ar, while Kaiobito got his hands on Piccolo's cape and Oolong's ears. _Not that it matters,_ Yamcha thought. _We'll all be dead in a few seconds anyway --_

Then he and his unconscious burdens all landed on something. The impact knocked the wind out of Yamcha, but whatever he'd hit wasn't hard. It was soft. And squirming.

"Get off me, you're heavy!" it gasped. "And help me catch the others!"

Yamcha realized that he was nose-to-nose with green antennae. He pulled his head back in disbelief.

"Dende?"

Then they were all flattened again as Kaiobito, with Piccolo and Oolong, teleported on top of them. They were all on Mr. Popo's flying carpet--or rather, doing a credible "ten clowns stuffed into a Volkswagen Beetle" impression on top of the flying carpet.

"Can this thing support our weight?" Yamcha gasped.

"The gravity's lighter here. I think it helps." They flew past several openings in the side of the shaft. Dende steered the carpet into one of the openings, and settled with an overburdened thud onto the metal floor.

"I saw you guys fall," Dende said as they spilled off onto the floor, gasping or laughing with relief. "I've been chasing you for a good minute and a half."

"Dende, what in the galaxy are you doing here?" Kaiobito asked him.

Dende blushed darker green. "When we saw the spaceship from my Lookout, we assumed that it was the source of all the problems. I took Mr. Popo's carpet to see if there was anything I could do."

"By yourself?" Yamcha asked in disbelief.

The young Namekian looked down at his hands. "Well, I _am_ the guardian of Earth. I had to do something to help. All I ended up doing, though, was flying around in here, hiding from the machines. I have managed to explore a bit, though."

"The ki source!" Kaiobito said suddenly.

"What?"

"We sensed two sources of ki on the ship. One of them must have been yours, probably the weaker of the two." He concentrated. "Because I can still feel the other one, very faintly."

"You should've come down to get help on Earth, Dende," Yamcha said. "What did you think you could do by yourself?"

"I don't know," Dende admitted. "But I stopped by Karin's Tower on my way here, to make sure everything was okay, and he told me that, like me, all the fighters on Earth have lost their ki. I didn't know how much help it would be to bring others along. All I could do was take them into danger with me, and I hardly have any healing ability right now."

"Speaking of healing ..." Kaiobito knelt beside Piccolo and laid his hands lightly on the Namekian. After a moment he said, "I don't think any of them are seriously injured, or depleted in ki like the children. They're just stunned from hitting the wall. The Potara transformation, and therefore the fusion, must have broken when they passed out. Most shapechangers change back to their natural form when they're unconscious."

"Well, at least it's not permanent," Yamcha said.

"We should try to wake them up, because it's not safe to stay here," Dende said. "Actually ... there's something I've found that you must see. I think I know what the other ki source that you mentioned is. I'll take you there, when we've got everyone awake."

 

* * *

 

"You chased them into the _reactor shaft?_ Are you completely defective? What part of _take them alive_ don't you understand?"

There was a sizzle of frying electrical components as the spiders' circuits were forcibly burned out. They fell to the floor, twitching.

"All right. Full sensor alert--if there were survivors, I want them found. I don't care about the others; kill them if you like; but don't forget how impossibly fragile flesh-beings are--you'd better make sure the Gifted One stays alive, or you'll be recycled just like that defective bunch."

"You've already put the smaller units into Phase Two, I noticed," said a different voice.

"I though it would be a good idea. This planet has too many strong fighters, even without being able to use their worthless life-energy. It's best to finish cleansing that world and move on."

 

* * *

 

When the wind sucked Gogeta, Bulma and the boys out of the car, Gogeta made a quick, desperate effort to reach down inside himself and draw out all the ki that he possibly could. It worked; he was able to manage a short, inexpert flight into one of the various tunnels opening into the shaft. He dropped Bulma and the kids gently to the floor and sank to his knees, gasping.

"Vegeta, Son-kun, are you all right?" Bulma cried worriedly, putting her hands on both sides of his face.

Gogeta nodded. "Just ... need to get my breath back."

Bulma frowned at him, then crept to the lip of the tunnel mouth. This particular tunnel was round and appeared to be some sort of outflow or ventilation shaft, though it was, fortunately, dry at the moment. Peering down the shaft, she could make out a faint glow far below. There was no sign of anyone else.

"Yamcha ... Kuririn ..." she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.

"Hey ... Mom? Where is everybody?" Trunks asked, as the boys approached on either side of her.

Bulma wiped at her eyes with her hand. "I don't know, Trunks-kun."

Gogeta leaned over her. "I can feel ki down there. I can't pinpoint it well enough to tell if everybody made it, though." He closed his eyes briefly. "I just wasn't fast enough."

"It's not your fault." Bulma drew a deep, shaky breath, and looked up at him. "Now what do we do? Try to rendezvous with them?"

Gogeta gestured at the tunnel around them. "We'd better find a way out of here first. I don't think I should fly any more unless I absolutely have to."

Bulma checked her watch. "Still about ten minutes until we should unfuse you." Then she put her hand over her mouth. "Oh no--Kaiobito! We can't do it without him."

"I'm sure we'll find a way," Gogeta told her, but his cheerfulness was somewhat subdued due to concern for his friends (or Goku's friends, at any rate).

Bulma glared at him, then sighed, and her shoulders drooped. "It's kind of ironic. We thought fusion would solve our problems, but now all we can think about is undoing it."

They began to walk along the tunnel. Its curving sides made walking difficult, and it also sloped slightly upward. The boys were having a blast, sliding around and pushing each other, until Bulma separated them and forced them to keep one hand in contact with the walls at all times. She had nightmarish visions of them all sliding back down and shooting out of the tunnel into the shaft.

But this did not happen, and after climbing for several minutes, their tunnel joined up with a bigger one. This one had a flat bottom and curved gently out of sight in both directions.

Bulma looked at Gogeta. He shrugged. She looked down at the boys, who looked back up at her. With an annoyed sigh, Bulma turned right and led the way down the tunnel.

After walking for a time, Gogeta suddenly froze and put out a hand to stop Bulma. "Wha--" she began but he hushed her. He pointed back down the tunnel behind them, and put a finger to his lips.

"Something's coming?" Bulma whispered. He nodded. Now she heard the clinking and clanking of some kind of machine. The tunnel continued to curve, so they could not see what was coming.

"We'll fight it!" Trunks cried, his shrill young voice joined by an enthusiastic "Yeah!" from Goten.

"Shush!" Bulma hushed them frantically.

They looked around for a place to hide, but there was none. A moment later, about a dozen spiders scuttled around the corner, accompanied by a swarm of hovering robots like the ones Bulma had pointed out as monitoring devices back at the ZX-72. These spiders were yet another variety--rather than being leggy with small bodies, like the daddy-long-legs shape of the spiders on Earth, they were squat with thick legs and wide bodies.

"Chhhh ..." Gogeta muttered and pointed at the first spider, firing a small ki-blast. It disintegrated. The others halted in shock, then scuttled briefly around in circles, not unlike real insects confused by the sudden appearance of an enemy.

"You're not supposed to be doing that!" Bulma snapped, looking around for some sort of weapon.

"Goten! Let's fuse!" Trunks yelled at the other boy, who nodded. "FU --"

Bulma stepped between them, flinging them apart. "Ow!" she yelled, receiving a jolt like a small electric shock. "Absolutely not! Trunks, if I catch you fusing with ANYBODY, I'll ground you until you're 95! Goten, I'll make sure your mother does too!"

Gogeta, meanwhile, was taking out one spider after another. A piercing headache lanced through his temples and he fell to one knee, but kept firing.

"Stop it, you fool!" Bulma yelled at him, seizing him by the shoulders.

Gogeta lowered his hands and the surviving spiders scuttled hastily out of sight, leaving the smoking remnants of six or seven of their number.

"Idiot!" Bulma snapped, shaking him.

"Ouch," Gogeta muttered, raising one hand to his forehead. "You're making my head hurt, Bulma."

 _"You're_ making your head hurt, you stupid Saiyajin. Are you in a big hurry to die?" Bulma spun on the boys. "Goten! Trunks!"

They shrank back. "Trunks, your mom is scary when she's mad," Goten whimpered.

"Yeah," Trunks mumbled. "I know. She's even scarier than Papa."

"Help me," Bulma ordered, and she hurried over to the scattered spider parts and began picking them up.

"What are you doing?" Gogeta asked, getting up with some difficulty.

"I refuse to let you kill yourself protecting me when I am perfectly capable of protecting myself," Bulma snapped, sorting through debris. "I may not be able to fight Cell, or Buu, but all it takes to kill these guys is a well-placed gunshot."

"You're going to build a gun?"

"I don't know what exactly I'm going to build. Whatever I have the parts for. In the meantime, the legs make good weapons."

"That they do," Gogeta murmured, wincing slightly from Goku's recollection of how much damage the sharp legs could do.

Bulma handed a leg to each of the boys. "Coooool," Trunks said, swinging it around experimentally like a sword.

"You had better only use that in self-defense, young man."

"Bulma!" Gogeta yelled as a spider appeared cautiously around the bend and ki-blasted it, causing himself to fall back to one knee.

"I said stop it!" Bulma yelled at him, but she hastily scurried back to him with an armload of electrical components.

"I guess we need to find a place where you can work on that," Gogeta said, looking over his shoulder. No more spiders came around the bend, though several of the sensor-bots hovered in the air above the smoking wreckage.

They followed the passageway, glancing backwards nervously. Bulma could hear the occasional clatter of spider feet on metal. They were being followed, but at a cautious distance.

The tunnel ended suddenly at a metal door, resembling an airlock. It had a straightforward wheel-type handle. "The layout of this ship makes no sense," Bulma grumbled as Gogeta opened the door. "It's like it wasn't designed but just sort of built itself. What was the point of that shaft? What was the point of any of the tunnels we just--oh."

Her voice trailed off into a small squeak. The door opened onto another tunnel--a tunnel full of spiders.

After her initial panic, Bulma realized that it wasn't actually FULL of spiders--there had been another patrol on the other side of the door, about the size of the one Gogeta had just demolished. All the spiders lunged at the door. Gogeta hastily tried to close it, but they wedged their bodies in the way, their legs scrabbling at him.

"Vegeta!" Bulma yelled, pointing the other way. The rest of the spiders were charging around the bend en masse. And there were more of them: they appeared to have augmented their numbers.

Gogeta grinned and flexed his fists. "All right! You bugs want a fight? Let's fight!"

He leaped into the air, using his ki-augmented strength and speed to smash one after another. Bulma retreated against the wall behind the door, swinging a spider leg like a club. Gogeta defended them easily at first, but as he began to deplete his energy, the spiders started swarming over him. "All right, this is ridiculous," he muttered, and powered up with a scream of rage, frying the spiders' electrical circuits and sending them crashing into the walls. Gasping, he dropped to his knees, a light sheen of sweat on his skin.

"Vegeta! Son-kun!" Bulma started towards Gogeta, when suddenly more spiders surged through the half-open door. "Damn it!" she screamed. "There's too many of them!"

The two little boys leaped to her defense, knocking back spiders by swinging their captured spider-legs. These new spiders were a mix of the same kind they'd been fighting before, and a new kind with heavy pincers on the front, like lobsters. One of them picked up Bulma by clamping its pincers around her waist, hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to break the skin. "Hey! Hey! HEY!" Bulma shrieked, beating it repeatedly over the head.

Gogeta came out of his daze when he heard Bulma's screams and jumped into the air, ki blazing around his body. He hurtled down on top of the spider's body and smashed it into the ground. Bulma dropped to her feet, breathing hard, then cried out a warning that came too late, as another of the pincer variety clamped onto Gogeta from behind and lifted him into the air. Gogeta twisted desperately, his arms pinned at his sides, then he cried out in pain as the spider used the pincers to deliver a powerful electric shock.

"HAAAAA!!!" Trunks and Goten yelled together, jumping on top of that spider. They didn't do much damage, but they did cause it to drop Gogeta, who tumbled free only to get whacked across the back by a blow from another spider--sending him flying straight onto the upraised legs of one of the dead spider carcasses.

Bulma froze. So did the boys. Gogeta's momentum had impaled him on the spider's sharp legs. He managed to pull himself free, then fell to the floor in a pool of blood.

"Dad!" "Papa!" The boys ran to him. So did Bulma. The spiders closed around them, but didn't attack. Bulma was far too agitated at the moment to notice or wonder about it. She dropped to her knees beside Gogeta.

"Senzu beans! Do you still have senzu beans?" she demanded.

Gogeta opened and closed his mouth, trying to talk, but his lungs had been pierced and he couldn't form sounds. Blood bubbled from his mouth and nose. _He's dying ..._ Bulma thought in terror. She found the familiar brown pouch tied at his waist and shook out the two remaining senzu beans with hands that trembled so much she almost dropped them.

Gogeta's body arced in a shuddering spasm. Suddenly, blue light flared around him, and he separated in a flash into Goku and Vegeta. Bulma didn't have time to wonder about that, either--both of them were still as badly injured as Gogeta had been, and drowning in their own blood.

"Help me hold them!" she shouted at the boys, who had been cowering with the terror that all young children experience when their parents, supposedly the invincible pillars of their world, are rendered sick and helpless. Urged on by Bulma's voice, they fearfully approached Goku (the nearest of the two) and gripped his shoulders, holding him while Bulma forced his clenched jaws apart and thrust a senzu bean onto his tongue; then the three of them did the same to Vegeta. The trembling convulsions ceased almost immediately. Bulma kept Vegeta's head in her lap, smoothing his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. The boys clung to her anxiously.

"I wonder why they separated?" Bulma said aloud.

"Ki ..." Goku murmured.

Bulma looked over at him, a smile breaking across her face. "Son-kun!"

Goku rolled over, trying to raise his head, wiping the blood from his mouth with a shaking hand. "Ki ... surges when a person is near death. It's the body's last effort to keep from dying. That's why ... that's why sacrifices are so common in magical rituals. It ... it's also wh-why Saiyajin become stronger after they've been near death. It forces the body to break through its own barriers."

"How do you know all that?" Bulma asked, laughing in relief.

"I know a lot about ki." He grinned at her and laid his head down on his arm.

"Daddy!" Goten cried, running to fling his arms around his father's neck.

"Ouch ... hi there, Goten. It's okay."

Vegeta was stirring in her lap. She leaned over her husband, her blue hair falling in his face. "Vegeta?"

"Quit clinging to me, woman," the prince mumbled. "What?" His eyes flew open. "Fusion ... the fusion ended."

"Thanks for stating the obvious." Bulma laughed and hugged him, then went to check on Goku.

" 'mokay," Goku mumbled, trying to get up and falling back down.

"No you're not," Bulma said, then felt something clamp onto her waist. "Gah!"

She had completely forgotten about the spiders. Now one of them held her up in its pincers. No matter how she tried to struggle, her feet were too high to touch the ground, and she couldn't reach its body with her fists. She tried to pry off the pincers, but she might as well have beaten her hands against stone.

Looking around, Bulma saw that other spiders were holding Trunks and Goten, both of them struggling so violently that they were like a couple of little blurs. Goku and Vegeta, who were too weak to struggle, had also been picked up.

The pressure of the pincers on her waist was uncomfortable, but not painful. Now she realized something that should have been obvious from the beginning. _They haven't been trying to kill us this time._ Bulma thought back on the fight. Gogeta had only been injured because he'd accidentally become impaled on a dead spider. The rest of the time, the spiders just seemed to be trying to corner them or pick them up.

"Trunks? Goten?" she called, her voice shaking slightly. "Are you kids okay?"

Goten had stopped trying to escape and dangled in the spider's grasp, looking very frightened and young. "Uh-huh," he nodded.

Trunks was still trying to punch and kick the spider holding him.

"I don't think they mean us any harm," Bulma said. "I think they're just trying to capture us."

The spiders had started to move, trundling along, carrying their prisoners. Bulma swallowed hard, trying to quell the panic rising inside her. They were completely out of senzu beans, and the only two strong fighters in their group were too weak to fight. She had no idea where her other friends were, or even if they had all survived the fall down the shaft. _All in all,_ she thought, _it looks like we can forget about saving the world; all we can hope for at this point is to save ourselves._


	14. The Secret of the Gifted Ones

The prince of the Saiyajin race seethed. He couldn't do anything else at the moment.

The spider's pincer held him just under his ribcage, digging into his stomach and making it difficult for him to breathe. Vegeta was no stranger to discomfort, but it was different when it was being inflicted by somebody else and he could do nothing to remove it. He didn't even have enough strength at the moment to raise his head, so all he could do was watch the metal floor passing under his feet, and grit his teeth as the ache where his weight bore down on the pincer grew slowly into dull, throbbing pain. The space suit had been torn apart when he and Goku separated, so he was back to his usual tank top, which didn't provide much protection.

Losing his ki-sense again after being part of the Gogeta fusion was like being stricken deaf and blind all over again, but still he strained his senses. He was able to feel Bulma's ki, and the boys'. He couldn't feel Kakarrot's ki, but he could see him out of the corner of his eye, and Goku appeared to be alive, though no stronger than Vegeta at the moment. His ki must be so low that Vegeta couldn't even pick it up, even though no more than a few feet separated them.

Lovely. Just lovely. Of all the times when he wouldn't have minded Kakarrot being stronger ... _Worthless Kakarrot,_ Vegeta fumed, but he was mainly angry at himself--angry for letting his thinking become clouded by everyone else's optimism and participating in a fusion that left them worse off than they had been before ... angry because he and his mate and son were being taken to an unknown destination and he could do nothing to save them.

He could feel his strength slowly returning as his body replenished its reserves of ki. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been this weak without being physically injured. Using ki was like walking or breathing--it was almost impossible to be too exhausted to do it, without something being physically wrong.

Vegeta flexed one hand. Yes, his strength was definitely returning. He didn't want the spiders to know this, however. He was starting to be able to feel Goku's faint ki, so Goku must be getting stronger, too.

But without ki attacks, without weapons, how could they free themselves, Bulma and the boys without getting killed? The sting of his failed battle against the spiders on Earth was still sharp. Between them, he and Kakarrot had only managed to kill two of them, and Goku had ended up badly injured as a result. He'd done somewhat better a little later on, fighting the spiders in the cave, but that was only after he'd decided that he was probably going to die and didn't care if he got hurt in the process.

 _I intend to live,_ he thought grimly, narrowing his eyes. He raised his head a trifle, enough to catch a glimpse of Bulma's blue hair. _I intend to live through this, and I intend my wife and son to live through this._ A slight shift of the spider's pincer brought Goten into his field of vision; the little Kakarrot-lookalike dangled helplessly in the spider's grasp, sucking his thumb as he tended to do when he was frightened. _And Kakarrot's brat as well,_ Vegeta thought to himself, slightly irked; he still refused to admit that the kid had grown on him over the years. A _nd ... fine, why not go all the way ... Kakarrot too. We're all getting out of this, and as the prince, it is my responsibility to make sure that we do. I just don't know how yet._

 

* * *

 

"Stop."

It took a moment for the small group of humans and assorted other creatures to realize that the word had not been spoken aloud, but whispered into their minds. They responded, however--flattening themselves against the wall while a spider patrol scuttled by in the tunnel adjoining their own.

When the spiders had passed, Dende and Kaiobito--who were leading the group--leaned out into the tunnel, looked both ways, then looked back and nodded to them to come forward.

"I forgot about you being able to read minds," Kuririn said softly to Kaiobito.

"I can't at the moment," the god responded. "It is all I can do to manage small telepathic contacts. My telepathic abilities were never that strong to begin with, and have been weaker since the fusion with Kibito. I cannot pick up any of your thoughts."

Well ... that was good, at least. Kuririn didn't feel like he had anything to hide, but it still wasn't pleasant to think of someone else walking about in your mind. He cast a glance back at Piccolo, who was bringing up the rear. The two had not spoken to each other since regaining consciousness, and continually found excuses to be at opposite ends of the group.

Kuririn found that he couldn't remember much of Piccolo's thoughts. He had a dim recollection of what it was like to regenerate one's own body parts--not a specific memory but a very visceral understanding of _what it was like._ He had a similar feeling about shape change, and the thought occurred to him to wonder if it could be taught. He now knew what it felt like, and what mental processes were required to get it to occur--could he learn to do it on his own?

 _I can't imagine what use it would be, though,_ he thought glumly. _Besides, Eighteen probably wouldn't let me do it in the house. She'd say it sets a bad example for Marron._

He was still curious. He fell back to walk alongside Yamcha and Pu'ar, who was back in her accustomed place above Yamcha's shoulder. Of the four who had been involved in the fusion, only the little blue cat seemed unbothered by it. She was back to her usual, cheerful self.

Oolong had not stopped complaining once, except for the times that he was hushed by the others when they were hiding from spider patrols. Kuririn could hear him muttering to himself: "--wasn't worth THIS, I'll tell you for sure. That woman can go jump off a cliff for all I care. Ugh. I keep reaching up and wondering what happened to my antennae. Antennae! Pigs aren't meant to have antennae. It's not natural. I don't know why I'm doomed to --"

Kuririn tuned him out again.

Yamcha looked down and noticed Kuririn. "How are you doing?" the scar-faced fighter asked. He strolled along easily, the sword held loosely in one hand.

"Me?" Kuririn said. "I'm all right. Really," he insisted, seeing the look that Yamcha was giving him.

"That must have been freaky," Yamcha said. "What was it like?"

Kuririn tried to figure out how to describe it, but gave up. "Not as strange as you'd think," he said finally. "I mean, it seemed pretty normal at the time. A little like ... I don't know, like how you normally have conflicting desires inside yourself, only in this case the different voices in my head really were different voices. Uh ..." He realized that Yamcha was giving him that look again. "Not too bad," he finished lamely. "But I wouldn't want to do it again."

"Especially now that we know fusion doesn't help that much," Yamcha said.

Kuririn nodded. Turning his attention back to the two gods leading their party (one small and green, one slightly taller and blue) he mused aloud, "So where do you suppose we're going? Did Dende mention it while I was unconscious?"

"Nope," Yamcha said. "He seems to know where he's going, though."

Kuririn was glad somebody did. All the different passageways looked similar to him. They joined and diverged apparently at random, curved in strange ways. They walked through huge rooms full of rusted, apparently abandoned machinery. An entire ship occupied only by robots, he thought. Did it once have living inhabitants, or has it always been this way? he wondered.

"The ki source is close," he heard Kaiobito say, and Dende responded, "Yes. It's right down here."

They were now in a hallway with doors along the sides. It was scaled to slightly larger than human size, as if it had been built for beings who were seven or eight feet tall. Dende paused at some of the doors, and stopped at one. Unlike the other doors, which were corroded and looked as if they hadn't been opened in years, this one had worn a shiny groove on the floor and it had several new-looking electronic locks, with small red and green lights blinking complacently on them. Dende peered through the small window in the door, then tapped on it. "Hello?"

The others gathered around Dende. "Who is in here?" Kaiobito asked.

Dende looked up at the rest of them, his eyes very sad. "Prisoners," he explained.

 _Prisoners--of course!_ Kuririn thought. In their restricted ki-sensing condition, what they'd taken for a single large source of ki was actually a number of small ones all in one place.

Dende pressed his hand to the door. "Hello?" he said again.

A voice called back from inside, speaking the Universal language that many beings (including Namekians and humans) could understand--though strangely accented. "Hello? Is it you, little green one?"

"Yes, it's me. I've brought friends, and we're going to try to get you out."

Kuririn stood on tiptoe to look through the small window in the door. He saw what appeared to be a dormitory-style room, but very drab and drear, made all of metal. The "beds" were metal slabs, the lighting dim, and the whole area gave off the feeling of a prison cell. He could see several beings inside, all of different races, sitting or slouching (or whatever their species did) on the metal slabs. None of them looked up. The only one who showed any interest in them was the one in front of the door who had been talking to Dende. It had four limbs and four eyes, though one of its eyes was closed by an old scar. Its entire body, in fact, was scarred. Looking at the others, Kuririn saw that they were even more decrepit, many of them crippled, with artificial or missing limbs.

"Who are they?" he asked softly, moved by pity.

Dende looked at his friends, his face troubled. "They are scientists whose worlds have been destroyed by these machines. This one here is Ygarddro; he is the youngest among them, and the only one who still has any interest in the outside world. The others, as you see, do little more than sit. I'm not quite sure how long Ygarddro has been here, but based on how long he says his species lives, I would guess about fifty years."

"Fifty years?" Kuririn repeated in horror, trying to imagine living in this horrible place for so long.

Dende nodded.

"But why are they here?" Piccolo asked.

The young Namekian frowned. "Because the machines believe they are blessed by the gods. The way Ygarddro explained it to me, the machines that you've seen, the ones you call spiders, are under the control of smarter ones. However, they do not know how to repair themselves. They believe that the ability to build machines is a special blessing given only to mortals. As a result, on the worlds they've destroyed, whenever they found a being who demonstrated the ability to build or repair machinery, they took them along." His eyes closed in sorrow. "The machines ... would torture their families to force them to help, and after their families died, they ..." His voice shook. "They'd torture the scientists themselves, until finally they were beyond all cooperation. Most of those you see here are like that. They've lost all will to live."

Kuririn clenched his fists. "That's awful! We have to free them."

"Bulma," Yamcha gasped suddenly.

Everyone looked at him. "What about her?" Kaiobito asked.

"Bulma! Do you think they know about her mechanical abilities? Do you think they'd try to do to her what they've done to these people?"

Dende's eyes widened. "I don't know. And you don't know where she is?"

"Somewhere on the ship, that's all I know."

Piccolo spoke up suddenly. "If they were truly watching us through those hovering devices back at the capsule ship--they would have seen her build that ki-detecting device. Would that be enough for them to conclude that she's a scientist or mechanic like these people, Dende?"

"I ... I don't know," the young kami faltered.

"She's got Gogeta with her," Kuririn said, trying to be hopeful. "At least ... she did the last time we saw her. He'll protect her."

"She's also got her son with her." Yamcha's fists clenched. "If they're willing to do all this ... and they find out that Bulma can repair machines ... what will they do to her?"

 

* * *

 

"Bring the Gifted One to me, along with the children. They will be useful as leverage."

"What about the warriors?"

"Kill--no. Imprison them. They may be useful later, to ensure the Gifted One's cooperation."

 

* * *

 

The burdened spiders scuttled along the tunnels and then entered a series of shafts where they took to the air, flying sluggishly. Vegeta watched his surroundings as they flew, trying to put together the layout of the spaceship in his mind. Sometimes they would be speeding down a narrow tunnel; other times they flew through giant open spaces filled with incomprehensible machinery. Most of it had a deserted, abandoned feeling. Vegeta thought of Bulma's earlier comments on how the ship's architecture made no sense. He was inclined to agree with his mate. _It's like it wasn't designed but just sort of built itself,_ she'd said. To Vegeta, it looked as if that was more or less what had happened--not the ship actually constructing itself, but being constructed haphazardly, with new sections added at random, while old ones were converted to new purposes or just forgotten about.

He tried to think of anything similar that he'd ever seen before, but kept drawing a blank. The closest thing he could picture were refugee caravans from some of the worlds he'd had a hand in destroying. When the removal of a world's inhabitants went slowly (as it sometimes did; Freeza's forces were chronically understaffed in the frontier areas) some of the inhabitants would try to escape, cobbling together a fleet from private ships, garbage scows and anything else that would fly.

Vegeta's jaws clenched. He remembered blowing up such caravans ... laughing as they spiraled into the atmosphere of their homeworld, blazing like comets. He did not think of those days very often. He tried to drag his thoughts back onto the topic at hand.

Was it possible that this was some sort of refugee ship, then? It could be, but if so, what had happened to the inhabitants? This ship was old. Vegeta didn't know how old, but from seeing the scarred outside, and now the converted and modified inside, he suspected that it might have been flying between the stars for thousands or millions of years. Perhaps it even came from another galaxy besides this one ... which would explain why he had never seen its like before.

Suddenly a change in the spiders' flight pattern drew his attention. They were presently soaring through one of the giant open caverns. Many of the lights in its ceiling were dim or burned out, so he could tell nothing of what was under them except that it was very far down, and he could make out dark shapes that might have been machinery or even some sort of dwelling places. But that wasn't what had alerted him. Their little group was splitting up. The pincer spiders carrying Bulma and the boys went one way, accompanied by a few of the smaller spiders and floating spy-eyes, while the rest of them peeled off, bearing Goku and Vegeta with them.

 _No!_ If they were separated in this huge place, they might never find each other again--and certainly not before the spiders did whatever they wanted with Bulma and the children. Bulma had become aware of the change and begun to struggle, but her weak human arms were helpless against the powerful pincers.

Vegeta glanced at Goku out of the corner of his eye and briefly met the other's eyes. It looked like Goku was alert and awake. Neither of them were even back to their pre-fusion strength, though. He glanced back towards the other group of spiders. He could just catch the flutter of Bulma's blue hair and Trunk's small, pink head, but in a few more seconds, they would be gone.

He didn't know what to do. He couldn't come up with a plan for this. One thing he did know, though: right now, he knew which way the group carrying Bulma had gone. Once the spiders took him and Goku down who knew how many of these damn twisting, winding tunnels, he doubted if even he could find his way back. Lowering his eyes, he now saw that they were flying over a giant tank of some kind of liquid, rippling oily-dark in the dim light. He couldn't tell what it was, but at least it would break their fall somewhat--provided it wasn't acid or something equally toxic. At least their chances were better than if they fell straight onto the floor.

Vegeta met Goku's eyes again and wished he dared speak, to explain what he wanted to do, but if these spiders were like the ones on Earth, they could possibly understand words. The Saiyajins' only chance at the moment was surprise. The spiders still thought them too weak to move. Vegeta mouthed at Goku, "Go on three. One."

Goku looked at him blankly. Vegeta flicked his eyes towards the spider carrying him, then the one carrying Goku, and down at the rolling, dark liquid below them. "Two," he mouthed. Goku's eyes widened a bit and they mouthed together, "Three."

Both Saiyajin came suddenly alive in the spiders' grip. Goku was being held under the arms, and since his hips were slimmer than his chest, he simply vaulted upwards and slipped out of the spider's grasp and landed on top of it, balancing lithely. The startled spider clacked its pincers, but couldn't reach him.

Vegeta was being held around the stomach, under the ribcage, and the pincers were digging in too tightly to do the same thing, so he seized one pincer in each hand and tore them from the body. The muscles of his arms screamed protest, but he was still several times stronger than a normal human. He flung the pincers away from his body as he fell, plummeting towards the dark surface of whatever was below him. He kept the presence of mind to straighten his body out, pointing his feet down, and hoped against hope that he was falling into something that wouldn't immediately poison him.

The initial shock when he hit was so great that for a moment, he couldn't tell what he'd fallen into. The liquid closed over his head and reflex took over; Vegeta stroked towards the surface. His head broke through. He'd closed his eyes and clenched his mouth shut as he'd fallen, but now he had to open his eyes again--better to go blind from some alien chemical than to get stabbed through the head by a spider. Also, he had to breathe; all the air had been knocked from his lungs by the impact.

He opened his eyes and his mouth at once, gasping for air, and realized that whatever he'd fallen into was shockingly ice-cold. It trickled into his eyes and he recoiled from the burning sting, sure that he'd just blinded himself--then blinked, realizing that the stinging he felt was nothing more than his eyes responding to the coldness. He ran his tongue over his lips, tasting it. Water. Sort of oily and dirty, but just water. _Is it my destiny today to fall into EVERY cold body of water in or around this planet?_ Vegeta thought, flashing on the mountain river where he and Goku had fallen when they'd lost their ki. The gods definitely pulled no punches when it came to the great cosmic joke that was his life.

Treading water and blinking it out of his eyes, Vegeta squinted upwards, looking for Kakarrot and the spiders. He saw them after a moment. Goku was still balancing on top of his spider like a trick rider at a rodeo, despite its attempts to shake him off. Fortunately, the spider's dodges and rolls as it tried to throw Goku were thwarting the others' attempts to attack him. As Vegeta watched in some amusement, two of them dove for Goku at the same time, only to collide in midair and go tumbling off into the darkness. He heard a metallic clang as they hit the floor, and then realized that if Goku didn't jump off that spider soon, he was going to be carried out of reach of the water--and then he'd really be in trouble, because he couldn't jump off without breaking a leg (or his neck) when he hit the floor. _Why don't you jump, Kakarrot, you idiot?_ Vegeta wondered, but then he realized that Goku couldn't, because of the three remaining spiders flying around him. They weren't very maneuverable in the air, but they were more agile than a falling man, and they'd be on him in a flash as soon as he jumped.

 _Distraction time,_ Vegeta thought, and he slapped his arms down against the surface of the water with all his strength, sending water fountaining into the air and a wet crack echoing through the empty space around them. "Hey! Morons! What are you, blind? I'm down here!"

The spiders swarmed chaotically and then two of them dove towards Vegeta, who immediately submerged. That left Kakarrot one spider to deal with, plus the one he was riding; hopefully he could handle it, because he was on his own now. Vegeta stroked in a random direction, realizing that he might have just made a very stupid mistake--fighting underwater, with no weapons, against potentially faster opponents. He'd better try to avoid them, and hope that the cold, dark water confused their sensors. Where were they, anyhow? Had they entered the water? If they had, he couldn't tell their ripples from the reverberations around his own body caused by his swimming. He rotated underwater, looking around, but it was too dark; he couldn't see. His lungs screamed for air and he had a horrifying moment when he didn't know which way the surface was, but then he got oriented again, and swam in the slightly-less-dark direction. His head broke the surface and he gasped for air. Damn, that water was cold! It made it hard to hold his breath for more than a few seconds. Normally, he would be able to fight underwater for several minutes. Of course, normally he had ki to help keep him warm underwater, too.

Vegeta looked around. Multiple ripples were spreading across the surface of the water, and neither Kakarrot nor the spiders could be seen. Damn, damn, and double damn. The spiders must be in the water. No telling where Kakarrot was, and he couldn't spare the attention to try to search for Kakarrot's ki, as limited as his ki-sensing ability was right now. Hopefully Goku'd made it into the water without being injured or knocked unconscious when he hit. _And why the hell am I wasting time worrying about Kakarrot when I'm in this much trouble?_ his inner voice demanded furiously. He rotated slowly in place, trying to tread water without splashing, trying to see into the dark water. The ripples reflected what light there was, and made it impossible to tell what was under the surface. _The spiders can stay underwater indefinitely; they don't have to breathe. All they have to do is find me. Damn it! I've got to get out of here!_

He took a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface--a person can swim faster underwater, and less noticeably too. And came face-to-face, or rather, face-to-glowing-red-light, with one of the spiders.

 _Oh, shit._

It must have been sneaking up on him, either that or hunting for him and having trouble finding him in the dark water. It was aware of him now, though. Not more than ten feet away, it flattened its legs against its body and propelled itself towards him, looking rather like a squid.

Vegeta dodged. His head broke the surface involuntarily and he took advantage of the moment to gulp another breath of air before diving again. The spider was turning around to take another go at him, but one thing they couldn't do very effectively (in the water or the air) was change direction. Even though the legs on this kind were not quite as slender as the kind down on Earth, they still didn't have enough resistance to allow them to maneuver effectively. Vegeta, however, had hands and feet to swim with, and he drove himself into the spider with all his force, feetfirst into its body. Remembering how easily the legs came off the Earth ones, he grabbed one leg in each hand, planted his feet against its body and yanked them off. The spider tried to do what the one on Earth had done to him and grab him by the waist while he was distracted, but the drag of the water slowed its second set of legs enough that he was able to see them coming and move his hands to intercept those legs too. He ripped them off, and watched the spider's body sink helplessly into the depths. Water rushed into his mouth as he grinned a predator's grin and splashed back up to the surface, spitting water and taking a few deep breaths until his body stopped shaking for lack of oxygen. He still trembled from the cold, though.

 _One down, three to go, unless Kakarrot managed to take some of them out, but I can't count on it. I need to get out of this water before I'm too helpless from the cold to fight anymore._ He could see the edge of the giant water tank--or something, anyhow, rising out of the water; it was difficult to tell in the poor light if it was the side of the tank or just some sort of monitoring station or barrier in the middle of the water, but it was something he could climb onto at least.

The decision made, he pivoted and dove again to stroke for the side, and the suddenness of that motion probably saved his life. He just felt something brush his foot as it missed him. _Damn, it's one of the other ones!_ Vegeta swung around underwater, but it had vanished in the darkness. _Forget about where it went--swim for the side while it's turning around, it's your only chance!_ he told himself, feeling the cold of the water starting to lock up his muscles. He swam with all his energy, as the cold water rushed over his body--splashed to the surface for air, then dove and swam again. When he came up for air again, he saw that he'd almost run into the side while he was swimming underwater. And it was definitely the side of the tank, it had to be--a long dark barrier curving gradually in both directions. Vegeta swam up to it and touched it with his hand, feeling cold, slimy metal. He looked upwards. The top was about ten feet above the surface of the water. From dry land, he could have jumped that high, even without ki--but without a solid surface to jump from, he couldn't possibly do it, and it was too slick to climb.

Something brushed his leg again, and Vegeta almost screamed. _I hate not being able to see my opponent!_ He held his breath and ducked beneath the surface just in time to almost get stabbed through the head by a sharp spider-leg; it grazed his cheek and he felt the slick metal of its body slide past his shoulder before it rebounded in slow motion from the side of the tank. The cold, dark water had to be messing up its aim badly. The spiders must be reliant on either infrared or on the human-visible light spectrum in order to see. Regardless of that, however, the spider had the advantage, because it did not need to breathe, nor did it feel fatigue or cold. All it had to do was keep fencing with him until Vegeta was too tired and weak to fight back.

And meanwhile, Bulma and Trunks were being taken farther and farther away ...

That thought galvanized him. _I am the prince of the Saiyajin race! I will not die in the water like some kind of damned fish!_ He tried to seize its legs, but he was as affected by underwater drag as the spider (actually more so, since his limbs were thicker in comparison to his body) and missed completely. It missed him on its next attack, however. The two opponents whirled in a graceful underwater ballet of death, while Vegeta's lungs ached for air. He was going to have to come up again soon, and once he did that, he wouldn't be able to see the spider. He let momentum carry him against the side of the tank and planted both his feet. When the spider came around for another attack, he launched himself towards it. The spider was not maneuverable enough to dodge, and Vegeta ran into its body--but headfirst this time, not feetfirst, so he didn't have any leverage to pull off its legs. They grappled with each other, slowed by the drag of the water so that they seemed to be fighting in slow motion. The spider couldn't attack effectively with its opponent so close to its body, but Vegeta couldn't manage to twist himself into a position where he could pull off its legs, and dark spots began to dance in front of his eyes. The ache for air had grown to a desperate agony. _If I don't get to the surface soon, I'm going to --_

Pain lanced through his skull and he saw stars. The spider had managed to whack him in the back of the head with one of its legs. Worse than the actual damage, though, was his involuntary gasp of pain and shock. Water rushed into his mouth and nose. Normally, he would have been able to protect himself with ki, but now he gagged as water flooded into his throat. Vegeta lashed out in the beginnings of something he almost never experienced--terror. He scored a lucky hit, crushing the spider's body against the wall. But the damage was done; his vision darkened as he choked, his body contorting, his lungs spasming as they tried to rid themselves of water. But there was no air to breathe. He couldn't see anything, and his flailing hands and feet encountered only water. He didn't know where the surface was, where the side was. There was only water and darkness and cold.

 _I'm going to die,_ he thought, very lucidly. And that was the last thing he remembered; the next thing he knew was pain, pain in his head and lungs and chest. He was doubled over, coughing up mouthfuls of water, and every spasm sent fire stabbing at his lungs. Strong hands held him steady. Considering the way his life had been going lately, he had an idea whose hands they were, even before Goku's voice said, "Just breathe. Deep slow breaths. It's okay."

"Don't tell me what to d--" he snapped and sent himself into another agonizing coughing fit. His entire respiratory system felt as if it was on fire.

"Just relax," Goku said soothingly, easing his grip as Vegeta's coughing quieted and the prince found enough strength to support himself. "You almost drowned."

Saved by Kakarrot ... again. He was getting very tired of it. At least now he knew that Kakarrot wasn't dead. Vegeta pushed himself woozily to his knees. Goku steadied him with a hand on his shoulder; Vegeta started to push him away, then decided it really didn't matter considering that Kakarrot had practically been hugging him a minute ago. Speaking of which ... a horrifying thought occurred to him. "Kakarrot --" he said, between fits of coughing. "I didn't--when I stopped breathing, tell me you didn't --"

Goku looked puzzled and then his face lit up. "What, give you mouth-to-mouth? No. Once I drained the water out of your lungs, you started breathing on your own." He started laughing. "You should have seen your face just now."

"Oh, shut up," Vegeta snarled. He got to his feet, with a little help from Goku, who let go as soon as it was clear he could stand on his own.

"Seriously, Vegeta ... are you all right?" Goku asked him. "You weren't breathing when I dragged you out of the water, and you were cold as ice. I thought for a minute you were dead."

"I'm still cold as ice," Vegeta muttered, rubbing at his arms. He then realized that the top part of Goku's gi was wrapped around his shoulders. _Aaargh,_ he thought. It did help warm him a bit, though, and he was aware that it wouldn't help them at all if he collapsed from the cold.

Goku filled him in on what had happened. After Vegeta provided a distraction ("Thank you, by the way") Goku had realized that he couldn't possibly hit the water if he jumped off now; he was over the floor, and the fall would probably kill or seriously hurt him. So he tried a desperate move and jumped off the pincer spider onto the other one. His weight was too much for the smaller model and bore it down to the floor in a controlled fall, as he'd hoped. Goku had still broken his ankle when they hit, but the spider was badly damaged enough that he'd managed to finish it off by stomping on it with his uninjured leg. The pincer spider chased him down, but using the dead one as a weapon, he finished that one off, too. "Those kind with the pincers, they don't fight very well, and their legs aren't sharp like the other kind. The only thing they can really do is electric-shock you, and that's only if they can get hold of you."

After destroying the spiders, he'd started wondering where Vegeta had gotten off to. Hampered somewhat by his injured ankle, Goku had climbed up onto the edge of the tank in time to see the start of the fight before Vegeta ducked underwater and didn't come up.

"I figured you were in trouble, so I jumped in and used your ki to find you in the water."

"How did you get out again?" Vegeta asked, wringing out his sodden black hair.

"I kinda dragged you along the side until I found a ladder where I could climb out. I was afraid I'd waited too long, but there wasn't much I could do for you in the water, and I had to get you out of the water because you were so cold."

As he spoke, Goku sat on the floor, wrapping his ankle with strips torn from the leg of his gi. He had replaced his nearly destroyed clothing at Bulma's (she had learned to keep a spare gi on hand for the inevitable battle-damage) but this gi was starting to look similar to the other one. Vegeta paced back and forth in front of him, trying to recover body heat. His teeth had finally stopped chattering, but his lungs still hurt and his legs were shaky.

"How's your ankle?"

"Not too bad," Goku said, testing it--which, in Son-ese, probably meant, 'I'm in excruciating pain when I walk.' Vegeta noticed that Goku paled slightly when he put weight on it.

"Here, you can have this damn thing back again--it's wet and heavy." Vegeta gave him back the top of his gi. Broken bones and pain were a combination that could lead to shock, but staying warm would help with that.

"You're okay?" Goku asked, shrugging into it.

Vegeta was too weary to come up with some sort of sarcastic comeback, so he offered Goku a quick, tired half-smile. "Yeah. I'm all right, Kakarrot."

Goku smiled back, and straightened. He looked up at the side of the water tank. It curved out of sight in both directions--the thing was as big as a small lake. "What do you suppose that's for?"

"I don't know, Kakarrot. Could be part of some kind of life support system--it is interesting that there's a breathable atmosphere here, since all we've seen so far are robots. Could be part of a cooling system. Could be a habitat for some aquatic alien. Who knows." He looked around, mentally locating their position. "Okay ... the spiders with Bulma and the brats went that way. No telling how far, though. Can you feel their ki?" He had finally been forced to admit, to himself at least, that Goku's ki-sensing abilities were quite a lot better than his right now.

"No," Goku said.

It figured. Vegeta sighed and started looking around, hunting through the rusty junk around the artificial lake.

"What are you doing?" Goku asked him, limping after him. "I thought you wanted to go after Bulma and the boys."

"I do," Vegeta said, digging a length of corroded pipe out of the debris and testing his weight on it. "First, though, you need some kind of cane or crutch. Otherwise you'll completely cripple yourself." He handed the pipe to Goku. "Try that."

Goku tried leaning his weight on the pipe. "It's a little better. But we won't be able to move very fast. Do you suppose it would be better if you --"

"Do not let the words 'go on ahead' cross your lips, Kakarrot," Vegeta snapped. "You and I both know that one of us, alone, has very little chance of rescuing them. Hell, two of us probably don't have much chance either, but it's better than the alternative."

Goku nodded, acknowledging his point.

They started following the curve of the tank side. When they came to the spiders that Goku had destroyed, Vegeta paused, staring at the crushed bodies. "Too bad the woman's not here," he mused aloud. "Those things can fly. There has to be some way to get them to fly again, maybe under our control."

"Do you know a way?" Goku asked, leaning on the pipe. Just the little distance they'd walked so far had been difficult for him. He would never take flying for granted again!

Vegeta shook his head and muttered a curse under his breath. "I can do routine shipboard maintenance, but that's it. I'm certainly no mechanic."

"Hmm," Goku mused, his eyes becoming distant.

Vegeta eyed him. "What now, Kakarrot?"

"I just thought of something." He looked up at the ceiling high above them, a look of intense concentration on his face. This time, Vegeta figured out what he was doing; he'd seen that look before.

"You're calling that cloud again, aren't you?"

Goku nodded. "It can't possibly hurt to try."

"Can it come to you anywhere? Even indoors?"

Goku gave him an isn't-it-obvious look. "It's a cloud, Vegeta; it can go through things."

Vegeta glared at him.

Oblivious to the prince's annoyance (or choosing to ignore it, a skill he'd had lots of practice at developing) Goku went on: "The only problem might be if we're too high. Kinto'un can't fly this high carrying passengers. But if it can get up here on its own, inside the ship it should be able to--Ah!"

His sentence trailed off as the golden cloud swooped down towards them. "Well, I'll be damned," Vegeta muttered.

Goku tossed the metal pipe aside as Kinto'un came to hover in front of him. He tested his weight on it cautiously, and then held out his hands to Vegeta, who shook his head. Goku withdrew his hands, looking disappointed.

"You're not going to ride on it with me? But it worked before --"

"It isn't that," Vegeta said impatiently. "You can't support my weight and your own standing up, not on that ankle. Sit down."

"Oh. You're right." Goku sat down carefully--he was clearly in quite a bit of pain--and looked across at Vegeta. "This might be a little awkward."

"A _little?"_ Vegeta snapped, trying to figure out a way to keep himself on the cloud without sitting in Kakarrot's lap.

"When we were younger, I'd sometimes carry Kuririn by having him hang onto my back," Goku said. "And he was about the same size as me, while you're smaller. Smaller than I am now, I mean, not smaller than Kuririn."

"Yes, I always have _that,_ don't I," Vegeta sighed. He went around to the other side of the cloud and took hold of Goku by the shoulders.

"Your arms will tire quickly that way," Goku pointed out. "Put your arms around my neck or chest. Otherwise, you might fall."

Try as he might, Vegeta could not think of another way. Holding onto each other by the arms, as they had done before, had worked adequately, but his biceps had been aching with fatigue on just that short flight, and he didn't see any way to do it with Goku sitting down--not without his legs hanging through the cloud, at any rate, which looked even more idiotic than hanging onto Kakarrot.

"You will never tell anyone about this," Vegeta said between his teeth, hooking one arm around Goku's neck, and the other around his chest.

"If you wrap your legs around me --" Goku began, but he must have felt Vegeta's death-glare without even being able to see him. "... uh, never mind."

They floated off the ground. The cloud moved a bit sluggishly, having some trouble with two adult passengers in the lighter air pressure on the ship. Soon, however, they were high above the floor.

"Are you comfortable?" Goku asked.

"No," Vegeta snapped, "but I'm not in danger of falling off."

Vegeta still could not figure out how Goku controlled the direction of the cloud's flight, but it swung around to orient in the direction that Bulma had been taken. He focused on getting his rigid back muscles to relax, allowing the muscles of his arms to take the weight of his body. Goku wasn't hard to hold onto--the cloud was perfectly solid to _him,_ so he wasn't in danger of tipping over, and he was warm too. Vegeta was still chilled to the bone from being in the water.

"This way?" Goku said.

"Yeah."

The cloud swooped over the dark water. Vegeta glanced down, instinctively checking for spiders. He'd learned (after several hard lessons) to never assume that an enemy was dead without seeing the body--even though he knew that these particular spiders had been de-limbed or crushed, one part of him expected to see the glaring red light rising up through the water. But the water remained dark ... dark and cold. Vegeta shuddered and looked away.

"Are you still cold?" Goku asked. He'd felt him shiver.

"I'm fine, Kakarrot," Vegeta said shortly. Actually, he was warming up nicely now that he was sharing some of Goku's body heat, but there was no chance he'd tell that to Kakarrot.

The cloud glided onward, into the darkness.

 

* * *

 

"Not that it isn't important, but we can discuss Bulma's situation in a moment," Kaiobito said. "Right now, let's set these people free."

"I tried to break down the door, but I couldn't," Dende said. "I wasn't strong enough."

Piccolo looked at the solid metal door. "I don't think any of us are strong enough right now." He turned to the shapeshifters. Oolong promptly hid behind Dende.

"I could turn into a crowbar," Pu'ar offered.

"Crowbar?" Piccolo said. He wasn't familiar with human tools.

"I don't think it'd help," Yamcha said, running his finger down the edge of the door. "It fits too close. There's not enough of a crack to get a crowbar into." He examined the locks. "I don't know this type, but Pu'ar, do you remember what we did that one time we had to break into the armored car with the electronic lock on the safe?"

Pu'ar saluted. "Yes, Yamcha-sama!" She turned into a very large taser and floated into his hand.

"Stand back!" Yamcha told the others cheerfully and used Pu'ar to short-circuit the locks.

The others watched in amazement (or, in Piccolo's case, slight annoyance). "Is there anything you don't know how to break into?" Kuririn asked.

Yamcha laughed, embarrassed. "Lock picking skills aren't much use when you can tear off a door with your bare hands or punch through it. I'd completely forgotten that I used to have to use other methods."

Pu'ar returned to her normal shape and Yamcha kicked the door. It didn't budge. "Huh. That should have done it."

"It opens out," Kuririn said, pointing to the worn mark on the floor. "There must be a handle or something."

There was no handle; the door was smooth. There was, however, an instrument panel on the wall with a large button. Kuririn pushed the button. Nothing happened.

"Maybe there is a code or something," Yamcha said.

Kuririn sighed. "Everyone who knows about this kind of thing is somewhere else. Bulma, Gohan, Vegeta ..." He looked over their group. Piccolo and Dende were completely useless with technology. Oolong was ... well, useless with just about anything. From the blank way Kaiobito was staring at the instrument panel, technology was not exactly his forte either. Basically, it was up to himself and Yamcha to figure out how to open the door. He started to turn to Yamcha and then smacked himself in the forehead. "Honestly, if we were any dumber ..." He turned to Dende. "Dende, ask your friend inside how the door is opened."

Dende blushed darker green. "Uh ... right!"

Ygarddro, who had heard the conversation, told them which buttons to push, and a moment later, the door swung slowly open.

"You could have volunteered that information instead of letting us stand there looking like idiots," Yamcha snapped at the alien.

Ygarddro withdrew somewhat. "I did not think of it," he said in his accented speech. "You must understand ... it has been a very long time since I've been encouraged or even allowed to think for myself. And as for them ..." His gaze turned to the other creatures in the room. "I doubt if they even understand that the door is open."

Dende walked among the room's inhabitants. Most of them did not even seem to see him. A few watched him with a dull, listless expression. "The door is open! You're free! You can leave," he told them, but none of them responded.

"I tried to tell you," Ygarddro said. "They are barely aware of their surroundings. They have been here so long, and all that they cared about is gone. The meh'teka continue to feed them only because they do not want to deliberately kill the Gifted Ones."

"Meh'teka?" Piccolo repeated.

"The Metal People. That is what they are called."

"I recognize that language," Kaiobito said suddenly. "It's a very old language, and it's never been spoken in this part of the universe. All the speakers died out long, long ago."

Ygarddro made a motion that might have been a nod, if he'd had a neck. "That must be the builders of the meh'teka. I don't know anything about them. The meh'teka do not talk about them."

"Do you know anything of these people?" Piccolo asked Kaiobito.

He shook his head. "Not much. This was around the time when Buu was first released, so I had ... other concerns. They weren't an unusual race in any way, as I recall--just another spacefaring race, in another galaxy than yours. There was some kind of cataclysm on their homeworld and they went extinct long ago."

Piccolo turned to Ygarddro. "These meh'teka ... what do you know about them?"

"I know little," Ygarddro said. "I've done maintenance on the ship, that's all. They have machines that produce thousands, even millions of the low-level drones that you've seen. They use these drones to destroy all life on the worlds they encounter."

"Why?" Kuririn asked.

"Because they hate living things. I do not know if there is a reason. As I told you, I know little about the meh'teka or why they might have been created."

"Ygarddro-san told me that they follow a predictable system with the worlds they destroy," Dende said. "They hate all life, without regard for its kind, but intelligent life is the only sort that can offer resistance to them, so they ... kill those first. The first wave of drones--what you call spiders--are programmed to recognize intelligent species and slaughter them. Once those are dealt with, they kill everything else on the world at their leisure, and burn it to make sure nothing survives."

Kuririn shuddered, remembering how the spiders at Kame House had spoken to them, saying, "Humans ... destroy!" before they attacked. They'd seemed uncertain about Eighteen, starting to attack her only when she attacked them.

"But it's worse," Dende said softly. "They also have a powerful laser array on the ship. If they encounter significant resistance on a planet ... if their assault spiders seem to be failing ... they will use the lasers to cauterize the surface of the world."

He seemed to have trouble getting the words out. The reaction among the Z-senshi was sheer horror.

"If Bulma's father's invention works ..." Yamcha breathed.

"They'll all be killed ... along with all other life on Earth ... as soon as whoever's in charge finds out about it," Piccolo finished.

They all looked at each other. Their mission had now become desperate--they were working under severe time pressure. And they still didn't know how they were going to do it.


	15. Fire on the Horizon

"Look!" Videl screamed, so excited that she almost lost control of the plane. "Look at them!"

The effects of the deactivator on the spiders were stunning. As the plane containing Videl, Gohan and Chi-Chi swept over the seething mass of metal bodies, a ripple traveled behind them -- a ripple composed of deactivated spiders, toppling over and curling up their legs while the rest scrambled in confusion over their comrades.

"Dr. Briefs, are you getting this data?" Gohan asked breathlessly. He was leaning from the plane's open door with the deactivator, while Chi-Chi steadied him. They had built it with the simplest possible control: nothing more than a trigger, not unlike a child's water pistol. An assortment of knobs at the top allowed finer tuning, but it didn't seem to be necessary. The frequency they'd programmed into the machine in the lab seemed to be working -- it was really working!

"Loud and clear, Gohan," Dr. Briefs' cheerful voice said over the plane's radio. "The data from the deactivator is feeding back into the lab's computers. I've started stripping down every mechanical object I can find that has any sort of broadcasting capabilities."

Gohan laughed in spite of himself. "Bulma-san is going to kill you when she sees what you've done to all her mechanical devices!"

"If I must die, it's for a good cause," Dr. Briefs said nobly, and then he laughed, and so did Gohan. After all the stress of this impossibly long, difficult day, the feeling that they might be nearing a resolution was making them silly with relief.

"Gohan, look out!" Videl shouted, pointing over her shoulder. Spiders were launching themselves from the ground en masse, attacking the plane.

Gohan pointed the deactivator at them and those at the forefront seized up and plummeted to the ground. The spiders were massed so thickly that the bodies of the ones in front protected those behind, but as they fell, the next wave toppled, and then the next.

Chi-Chi laughed and released Gohan to clap her hands in joy, the years falling away from her; she looked like a teenage girl in her excitement. "Mom!" Gohan shrieked, almost falling out of the plane's open door.

"Gohan-chan!" She regained her grip on him. Even while he was in danger of falling, however, Gohan had not stopped squeezing the device's trigger. The ground beneath them was strewn with spider corpses. Suddenly a burst of golden light bloomed in the midst of the spiders and several burnt carcasses spiraled down to the ground, trailing smoke.

"What--?" Then Gohan saw one of the soldiers crouching with a rocket launcher. At first when the plane swooped out of the sky, the survivors of the military had just stood in astonishment, too battle-weary to figure out if they were being attacked from a new angle or not. Now, however, they'd caught on that the plane was helping them out, and they were doing their part to help defend their mysterious saviors. "Thank you!" Gohan shouted, waving.

Several more passes with the plane, combined with the efforts of the soldiers on the ground, left the battlefield nearly still. Here and there, a surviving spider struggled up over the giant mounds of dead spiders, but the soldiers picked these off easily.

"Okay, Videl, take it down," Gohan said, but she was already doing that. They landed in the middle of the thickest concentration of soldiers, and now Videl took charge, because she'd been around police and military personnel ever since she was a small girl. She leapt down from the plane's open door, a lithe dark-haired girl looking deceptively fragile in the dim, ruddy light. Most of the illumination came from the fire -- it was far too close for comfort, not more than a half-mile away. Ash drifted into Gohan's hair and sparks stung his face as he helped Chi-Chi down onto the ground.

"Who's in charge here?" Videl called across the battlefield.

A tall man in torn fatigues, his face stained dark with smoke and dirt, turned toward her and straightened up; he had been crouched beside a wounded soldier, propping the man's head on a rolled-up jacket. Recognizing her, he snapped a salute. "Miss Videl! I've never had the pleasure of meeting you, ma'am."

"Oh, don't bother with formalities," Videl said. "You're in charge--" She read the insignia on his shoulder. "--Sergeant?"

Stepping away from Chi-Chi, Gohan kicked nervously at a dead spider. Their experiments in the lab had indicated that the deactivator was a universal kill-switch and the spiders could not be reactivated from a distance, but he didn't want 4000 of them coming back to life behind his back.

"Yes, ma'am," the sergeant was saying to Videl. "We've had a lot of casualties, and almost all the officers ..." He swallowed. "They choose good men in this army, ma'am -- our officers aren't the type to stay behind while the enlisted men take all the risks."

"I can see that." Videl looked around, as Gohan and Chi-Chi joined her. A wind whipped around them--the fire was sucking all the oxygen out of the air, producing a vacuum, and surrounding air masses rushed to fill it. "You'd better evacuate," Videl told the soldier.

"We're already doing it, ma'am. Some of the men are so badly hurt that we're having to work slow." He looked curiously at the device in Gohan's hands. "If you don't mind my asking, ma'am, I assume you folks helped us out just now?"

"That's right," Videl said.

A nearby explosion drew their attention--one of the soldiers had just blasted another spider. "There will be more of them here soon," Gohan said. He held out the deactivator. "Here, take this. All you do is pull the trigger and it'll broadcast a signal that will shut down any spider within range. Use it to cover your men while you retreat."

The soldier took the weapon, handling it as if it was made of eggshell. "Don't you need it, sir?"

Gohan winced at the "sir." He'd never enjoyed authority. "We can make more. Now that you guys are safe for the moment, we're going to go back and do exactly that. You just get out of here and find a place to hole up and treat your wounded."

"If any of your men are in really bad shape, we can take them in our plane," Videl offered.

A quick examination of the wounded determined that no one was in serious danger, and most of them were already loaded in Jeeps and other vehicles, ready to move out. "We'd better go," Gohan said softly to Videl.

The sergeant tested the deactivator on another spider that had crawled out from under a pile of the dead ones. It worked like a charm--the creature keeled over, and the soldier smiled at Videl. "Thank you, ma'am. It's an honor to finally meet you."

"Oh, it's an honor for _me_ to work with brave men like yourselves," Videl said. She wasn't really any fonder of fame than Gohan, but she'd had a lot more experience at dealing with it. Her smooth facade faltered for a moment, however, as she remembered one of her reasons for coming out here tonight. "By the way ... do you happen to know where my father is?"

The soldier's eyes sparkled. "Mister Satan? Is he fighting the spiders? We're saved!"

"Yes, he's fighting the spiders." It's not really a lie, Videl thought; I'm sure wherever he is, Dad is doing ... something. He wouldn't just sit by.

"Videl ..." Gohan urged, looking up nervously at the approaching wall of flame. It was so close that they could hear explosions as trees were consumed instantaneously in showers of sparks.

They scrambled hastily into the plane, waving goodbye to the soldiers, and took to the air. Videl shuddered at the extent of the blaze. It had spread visibly since they'd been on the ground.

"The wind is pushing it right towards the city," Gohan said softly. "Even if we can manage to take care of the spiders, there's no way we can deal with _that_ without ki. We'd better start preparing to evacuate Capsule Corp."

"How long do you think we have?" Videl asked, turning the plane towards the city. Chi-Chi stood behind her chair, watching the screens, pale-faced and silent.

Gohan looked at her, his face strained. "Depends on whether the wind changes. If it keeps coming that fast ... not more than half an hour."

"Half an hour?" Videl repeated in horror. "But that's no time to do anything, and you just gave away our only working model of that gun! What can you do without the lab equipment? How will you make more?"

"The modifications we need to make aren't that difficult. If we can just find a safe place to work on them, we should be able to turn out lots more of the deactivators."

"What about that place where we went that one time?" Chi-Chi asked.

Gohan and Videl turned to look at her. "Um ... can you be a little more specific, Mom?" Gohan asked politely.

"You know what I'm talking about," Chi-Chi said impatiently. "Don't play dumb with your mother, Gohan! That floating palace or whatever it is, where we went to escape from that pink monster."

"Oh--Kami's Lookout! You know, that is a good idea." Gohan rubbed his hair, unconsciously reflecting his father's gesture as he pondered. "It'll be completely safe from fire, and we can rig up defenses to keep the spiders out, assuming they can fly that high."

"That's what we'll do then," Videl said, gripping the controls. "We'll load up everybody in a couple of planes, and all the equipment that we can take."

Gohan nodded, his mind still working furiously. It was going to be a tremendous struggle getting Dr. Briefs out of the lab. If the Buu situation was any indication, the scientist would probably want to stay in his lab until the end--but they needed his expertise elsewhere.

Of all his enhanced abilities gained through his Mystic training, one that Gohan had not acquired was the ability to sense the future. And it was probably just as well that he couldn't ... for he remained in blissful ignorance, unaware that what was about to happen in a few minutes would make the question he was pondering entirely moot.

 

* * *

 

For a long moment, Tenshinhan could only stand and stare up at the boy standing at the top of the ladder. Seventeen broke the contact, turning away, turning his back on them. Something moved at his side: a lean black hound, looking down over the side with a lack of expression that mirrored its owners. _Juunanagou has a DOG?_ Tenshinhan thought, with that part of his brain still capable of feeling surprise.

"Um ... excuse me?" Lunch called. "Excuse me, please, sir? Can you help us? We have an injured man down here."

Seventeen turned and looked over his shoulder, down at the soaked, exhausted threesome huddled on the dock. "Is that right?" he said, cocking an eyebrow.

 _No, Lunch, don't call attention to us! Maybe he'll just go away and leave us alone ..._ But Seventeen had turned back and was studying them again, hands on his hips. "I remember you," he said finally.

 _Oh, no._ "And I remember you," Tenshinhan said guardedly.

"Hmmm." Seventeen continued to stand inhumanly still, moving not a muscle, his head cocked on one side. Finally he said, "Tell me something, human. Do you know anything about this strangeness with the metal monsters? Have you noticed disruptions in your ki lately?"

"We can talk about that," Tenshinhan said, keeping his voice level. He glanced down at Chaotzu, who lay on the dock, unmoving and with a grayish tinge to his white face. "But first, my friend needs warmth and medical care, or he'll die."

"Whether or not he dies is no concern of mine," Seventeen said, crouching at the edge of the rockface. The dog put its head on his knee, and he absently rubbed its ears. "But I'm curious, you know. And I would venture to guess that you're considerably less powerful than I am right now ... so I have nothing to fear from you. Isn't that right?"

Tenshinhan didn't answer. He could feel sweat roll down his face, warm on his cold skin.

Seventeen straightened up in a quick, fluid gesture, and waved a hand casually as he turned his back on them again. "Well, come on up."

Tenshinhan looked at Lunch, who looked back at him, wide-eyed. She was no help at all in this form, but her blond form would be infinitely worse--subtle negotiations were not, to put it mildly, blond Lunch's forte. Instead of speaking, he offered her a supportive smile and then bent to put Chaotzu over his shoulder.

They climbed up the metal ladder. It was about 15 feet to the top of the ledge. Tenshinhan pulled himself up one-armed and then turned to help Lunch over the edge. When he turned back around, Seventeen was standing about ten feet away, the dog at his side, waiting for them. The dog didn't growl at them, but neither did it wag its tail. In some ways, Tenshinhan mused, the animal was creepier than its owner. He wondered if the dog was a cyborg too.

"Well, come on," Seventeen said impatiently, and turned away.

Erosion, possibly helped along by dynamite (or ki) had formed quite a cozy concavity in the cliffside. The ledge was flat and broad, some forty or fifty feet across, and cut back into the cliff nearly as far. Seventeen's little complex of buildings was tucked under the overhang. As he followed the cyborg youth, Tenshinhan marveled at the tidiness and engineering efficiency that was evident all around them. There was even a small garden in a greenhouse, though Tenshinhan wasn't sure if Seventeen and Eighteen needed to eat.

As they approached the domed buildings, they stepped across a narrow cleft in the rock. It was only about a foot wide, but looking down into it, Tenshinhan saw that it went all the way down to the water, which churned and boiled with great force as the narrowing cleft caused it to build up.

Seventeen noticed his hesitation. "That's where the power comes from, cyclops," he remarked, nodding towards the other end of the ledge, where a small building had been constructed over the cleft in the rock. Thick bundles of cables led from it to the other buildings. Of course ... the cleft was not an accidental crack in the ledge, but an intentional channel to force water through some kind of water wheel. So Seventeen even had his own power supply--between that, the river and the garden, he was completely self-sufficient down at the bottom of the river canyon.

 _And we never wondered what he'd been up to, all these years,_ Tenshinhan thought, slightly angry with himself. Seventeen could have been building a second Red Ribbon lab out here in the middle of nowhere, intending to complete his programmed task of annihilating Goku--for that matter, there was no evidence that he _wasn't_ doing it. And none of the Z-senshi had given him a second thought.

Seventeen opened a door for them, and held it. He smiled slightly at Tenshinhan's hesitation. "I've just had my back turned to you ... perhaps trust extends both ways," he remarked, the faintly amused, faintly condescending smile never slipping from his handsome, boyish face.

Tenshinhan set his jaw and gestured to Lunch to go ahead of him. At least if Seventeen attacked them, he could protect her.

The room inside the domed house was clearly a product of the same tidy mind that had constructed the complex. A large picture window yielded a beautiful view of the river, with a backless couch running along the inside of that wall. The furniture was all simple, stylish and modern. The walls bore mounted trophies (mostly dangerous creatures: tiger, rhinoceros, T-rex) juxtaposed with classy and expensive-looking paintings in tasteful metal frames. A brass-and-glass coffee table held a small collection of old-looking arrowheads. All in all, it looked like the weekend home of a wealthy trophy hunter, someone either educated enough to have good taste, or rich enough to buy it.

Tenshinhan became uncomfortably aware that he was dripping on the lush cream-colored carpet. He tried not to think about where the furnishings had come from. At least there didn't seem to be any bloodstains.

Seventeen seemed unconcerned about the mess they were making. He waved his hand at an open doorway. "There's a bedroom in there where you can take that odd little creature. I have plenty of room."

Tenshinhan glanced at him uncertainly, wondering what to make of the offer, but Lunch was already walking in the indicated direction, oohing and ahhing over the interior decorating. Tenshinhan followed her and saw that the big-game-hunter decor continued into the bedroom, with a thick bearskin on the bed and a deep-brown pile carpet. He laid Chaotzu in the middle of the bearskin and began peeling off his friend's soaked clothing.

Lunch must have gone to ask Seventeen for first aid supplies; he heard her voice speaking softly, and then she was back by his side with a metal case in hand. Tenshinhan wondered what Seventeen used first aid supplies for, but maybe it was for the dog, or maybe the needs of the cyborgs were not too different from those of humans. Eighteen did seem to feel pain in the normal human fashion ... it just took a lot more damage to get a reaction out of her.

"Lunch," Tenshinhan hissed out of the corner of his mouth. "Don't trust him, okay?"

"Why not?" Lunch asked innocently as she helped him dress Chaotzu's wounds. "He seems perfectly nice to me."

"Trust me, he's ..." Tenshinhan looked over his shoulder at Seventeen, who was leaning against the door, watching them with a slight, sardonic smile. "Not what he appears to be," he finished softly.

"But my hearing is very acute," Seventeen remarked.

Tenshinhan's head snapped back around. There was no sign that the cyborg had been offended by their conversation. His blue eyes were still coolly amused, and the one-sided smile didn't falter on his face.

Without saying more, Seventeen disappeared and reappeared a moment later with a pile of neatly folded clothing. "You needn't stand around in those wet things, dripping on the floor," he said, handing it to Tenshinhan. "I imagine this will be too small for you and too large for your female, but if it isn't to your liking, you can always wrap yourself in a bedsheet."

"I don't understand," Tenshinhan said softly, leaning forward so that he could speak without Lunch overhearing; her attention was consumed with tending Chaotzu. "She doesn't know what you are, but I do. Why are you helping us?"

"Why?" Poets sometimes call the eyes the windows to the soul, but if the cyborg had a soul, his eyes did not give onto it. They remained quietly amused, and his face reflected nothing. "I do not know, to be honest. I was curious about the world once, before I realized that everything I need is right here. Perhaps I still am." He started to turn away, then gave Tenshinhan another amused, slightly superior smile. "Oh, in case you were wondering, I do have money, and everything in this place was paid for by the usual human channels. I make a decent living, as you figure such things, by hunting and trapping in the mountains."

"I ... I didn't ..." Tenshinhan stammered.

"No, of course not." Seventeen summoned the dog with a small, imperious gesture, and pulled the door shut behind him. Tenshinhan stood with his arms full of clothing, staring after him, then shook himself and went over to the bed.

They made Chaotzu as comfortable as possible, and changed into Seventeen's clothing. He'd found a pair of loose sweatpants for Tenshinhan, probably the loosest he had, but they were still very tight across the fighter's thighs and ended several inches short of his ankles. Lunch looked charming (to Tenshinhan) in a pair of jeans that stretched tight over her hips and hung loose on her legs.

When they had changed, Tenshinhan opened the door. Seventeen was sitting on the couch in front of the window, gazing out at the last light of sunset blazing blood-red across the churning river water. The dog lay beside him on the couch, its head resting on its paws. It pricked its ears towards the two humans and gave a cautious flop of its tail--more of an "I'm watching you, so don't try anything" gesture than an attempt at friendliness. There were no lights on in the house, so the only light was the red glow of the sunset, outlining Seventeen's hair with a halo of fire.

Seventeen flicked them a glance. "Oh, don't stand. Sit down."

Tenshinhan sat awkwardly on the couch, as far as he could get from the cyborg without being rude about it. Lunch plopped herself between them and immediately started admiring the arrowheads on the coffee table.

"I found them all in these mountains," Seventeen said. "I suppose most museums would pay handsomely for them, but something about them appeals to me, crude though they are. I suppose I am fascinated that humans once possessed the ability to go naked into the mountains, chip a few pieces of rocks into clumsy knives ... and then, with nothing but those pathetic knives, to kill large animals, defend themselves from predators, build shelters, make fire ..." He shrugged, a slight roll of the shoulders beneath his orange scarf. "Whatever happened to all the humans like that, do you suppose?"

"I guess they found other outlets," Tenshinhan said.

"I wonder," Seventeen said. The light outside had almost faded from the sky. He reached over to snap on a lamp, and suddenly the dim shapes outside the window were gone, replaced with reflections from inside the room, a dark mirror-world. It was disconcerting to have been fighting for their lives only moments before, and now to be enfolded in the normalcy of a living room and a pool of lamplight. The outer world might not have existed; they were closed in their own little world, two humans and one creature that was not quite human and not quite _not_ human ... once a killer and now ... what?

"You know, I thought about entering the last World Tournament," Seventeen said thoughtfully, scratching the dog's ears. "I actually did attend, in disguise of course, and sat through one round before I was so disgusted that I flew back to the mountains. What passes for fighting prowess among these humans ... I can certainly see why my other timeline-self destroyed them, and I don't fault him for it." His ever-present smile quirked a little wider. "But of course, in _this_ timeline, there are plenty of powerful people who would stop me ... don't you agree?"

Tenshinhan wondered if Seventeen was merely trying to get a reaction out of him. "Yes," he said.

Seventeen shrugged again. "See. And it works out for the best, I imagine ... my other timeline self tended to end up badly, either killed by Cell or killed by that pink-haired brat, so I shouldn't complain. It's a funny thing ... if you bother no one, no one bothers you, either."

"Not always," Tenshinhan said, thinking of the many fights that he'd become involved in, against his will.

Seventeen merely smiled.

"You left the tournament too soon, in any case," Tenshinhan said. "I wasn't there, but from what I understand, your sister was in it."

Seventeen's eyes widened slightly, and he smiled again. "I know. I had no particular desire to watch her fight. I've seen her fight. Lost to that posturing idiot who supposedly defeated Cell, didn't she?"

"The general consensus, among us at least, is that she threw the match," Tenshinhan said. "She won't admit to it, though."

"Hmph. Sounds a lot more likely. If she'd actually lost to that moron ..." Seventeen trailed off, cocking his head to one side. At the same time, the dog's ears both pricked upright and it raised its head, looking out at its own reflection in the window.

"What is it?" Lunch asked.

"Hmmm." Seventeen rose from the couch and touched a button on the wall. White panels slid across the window, blocking out the reflections.

"Is something --" Tenshinhan began, tensing, and then he became aware of a sound: the whine of a hoverplane.

"Who's that?" Lunch asked.

"How very odd ... it never rains but it pours, as the humans say," Seventeen mused, picking up a rifle from beside the door. "I haven't had a single person come through here in the entire time I've been here, and now more than one visitor within the hour. Interesting."

He shut off the lamp, plunging them into total darkness. Lunch squeaked and reached for Tenshinhan's arm as he stood up slowly and steadied her in the darkness.

The door's well-oiled hinges whispered and Seventeen was framed against the slightly-less-dark outdoors, where the sunset's light was still fading away. Or ... _was_ that sunset? Unless he'd gotten entirely turned around in the water, the ruddy glow in the sky seemed to be coming from the wrong direction.

A light stabbed through the darkness, silhouetting Seventeen in the doorway. The dog stood beside him, legs stiff and head lowered. Seventeen rested the rifle on his shoulder, then lowered it slowly. "It never rains but it pours," he remarked again, and stepped out into the yard with the rifle slung over his shoulder.

Well, Seventeen didn't seem to be afraid, but, Tenshinhan thought, that didn't mean that _they_ shouldn't be afraid. He approached the doorway cautiously, keeping Lunch behind him, and peered out. A plane had touched down in the yard. He could see in the glow of its running lights that the plane bore the Capsule Corp. logo on the side, but with Capsule products being so ubiquitous in the world, that hardly made it safe. However, when the door opened in the side, he recognized the blond hair being whipped about in the canyon wind.

"Imagine meeting you out here," he heard Eighteen's voice say. She didn't sound surprised, which of course meant nothing. What did it take to get an emotional reaction out of these beings?

"The same," Seventeen said, shifting the rifle to a more comfortable position. "This is a bit far from the sunny beaches and creature comforts you prefer."

Her only response was a frosty glare. "Is Tenshinhan here?"

"I'm here," Tenshinhan said, stepping outside into the light.

"Hi, Juuhachigou," Lunch said cheerfully.

"Hmph," was Eighteen's only response. "Is that mime with you?"

"Chaotzu's inside," Tenshinhan said, slightly irritated. "He's injured."

"Well, leave him here or get him," Eighteen said. "We don't have time to waste and we need every fighter we can get."

"I'll get him," Lunch said quietly and vanished back inside.

"What are you doing, rounding up an army?" Seventeen inquired.

"Something like that." Eighteen jumped down to the ground, brushing back her windblown blond hair in a familiar gesture of annoyance.

"How did you know we were here?" Tenshinhan asked.

The female cyborg held up a device that resembed, to Tenshinhan, Bulma's dragon radar. "Bulma built this. Something like those scouter-machines the Saiyajin race used, I understand. As low as your ki is, it still enabled me to pick you out."

Seventeen turned to look back at Tenshinhan. "Interesting. You never did finish telling me about this odd ki incident."

Tenshinhan shrugged. "I don't really know much."

"Good, I can tell you both at once and not waste time," Eighteen said shortly. "It appears that every fighter on the planet has lost their ability to control ki. The source is a ship in orbit around the Earth. Most of the Saiyajins are up there now, along with Kuririn --" Did her voice falter slightly there, or was he imagining things? "-- and the Namek and a few others. Meanwhile, the Earth is being overrun with obnoxious metal creatures."

"We met them," Tenshinhan said.

Eighteen nodded brusquely. "So I don't have to describe them. Bulma's father and Gohan are developing a system to deactivate them, but we need hands. Lots of hands." She turned to Seventeen. "You can ride beside me. The others in the back."

Seventeen raised his free hand. "Hmm, I'll bow out. This doesn't sound like it concerns me."

Eighteen's eyes narrowed. "It concerns the entire planet. We need all the help we can get."

The sardonic smile quirked. "I don't 'help.' It's part of my non-interference strategy these days. I'm happy here, so I'll stay here. It was nice to see you again, though. Be sure and let me know how it goes."

He strolled back into the house, accompanied by the dog, passing Lunch on her way out with Chaotzu. As he went by Tenshinhan, he remarked out of the corner of his mouth, "Human, do make sure that she doesn't clip the antennas on the generator housing on the way out of the canyon. The wind can toss a small craft around."

"Uh ... sure." Tenshinhan looked down at his unfamiliar shirt and pants. "Uh, what should we do with --"

"The clothing? Keep it. I have plenty. It would be less irritating that having you wander about here trying to find your way back."

"Uh ... thanks," Tenshinhan said, and added, more sincerely, "Thank you." Half an hour ago, he reflected, they'd been wet and tired and Chaotzu was on the verge of death; now they were warm and dry, and the cyborg had been a decent host, for all his lack of people skills.

"Hmph," was all Seventeen said, and he closed the door of the house. It was impossible to tell if he turned on the lights or not, since the shutters stayed closed.

"Well, get in," Eighteen snapped at Tenshinhan and Lunch. "Unless you're going to wait around for the next New Year?"

They scrambled into the plane and Eighteen lifted off with steady, skillful hands. Obviously she wasn't going to be crashing into any antennas. Tenshinhan had the shotgun seat, while Lunch was in the back with the unconscious Chaotzu.

"There's no ladder up to the top," Lunch said suddenly, craning her neck to see out the window as they rose above the canyon walls. "How do you suppose he gets in and out?"

Eighteen was the one who answered. "Normally, he can fly," she said shortly.

"Oh." Lunch subsided. Of course, she wouldn't think of that, since she couldn't fly.

Tenshinhan only half-heard the exchange. Now that they were out of the canyon, he could see more clearly the glow on the horizon. Like the lights of a distant city, but more ominous, it stretched from horizon to horizon.

"What's going on out here?" he said softly.

Eighteen looked over at him, her eyes hooded. "The world is on fire," she answered simply. "We assume the spiders started it; either that, or careless humans with explosive weapons they don't know how to control. In either case, the fires are burning uncontrollably on almost every continent. All the Earth's defense forces are fighting the spiders. They can't spare people to fight the fires."

Tenshinhan drew a deep breath, let it out. "You said the Saiyajins were up on that ship you mentioned? I assume you mean Goku and Vegeta."

"And the children," Eighteen said.

"Well, I hope they hurry." Tenshinhan gazed moodily out the window, towards the distant glow lighting up the nighttime sky. "Because without ki, that fire is more of a threat to us, to the world, than the spiders ever were. It'll be unstoppable."


	16. A Pillar of White Light

I must not show fear. I must not show fear. I must not show fear.

Bulma chanted the litany in her head over and over as the spiders bore her and the children deeper into the tunnels of the ship. She'd kept track for a while, but now she knew she was hopelessly lost. Moments ago, the spiders carrying Goku and Vegeta had vanished--she did not know where they had gone, but she did know that now she was really, truly on her own.

No ... not on her own. Worse than that. She was responsible for two children as well.

She'd been in situations like this before, goodness knows, back in her adventuring days. Being kidnapped, manhandled, and tied to various things seemed to be par for the course in Bulma's life. And back in those days, she would have met the challenge head-on, screaming about the rough treatment or batting her eyes and flashing a bit of thigh at her captors, whichever seemed most likely to work.

But the years had gone by. She wasn't that carefree, self-centered girl anymore. She had a husband to think about, a son, and responsibilities at Capsule Corp. All she could think was, _I want to go home. I want to wake up safe in bed in Vegeta's arms, and go down the hall and see Trunks curled up in his bed, asleep. I want this nightmare to be over._

She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, and opened them again. She was still jolting along in the grip of a spider's claw-pincers. _If wishes were Capsule cars, nobody'd have to walk,_ Bulma quoted her father to herself, and felt a faint grin cross her face, despite a fear so great it was bringing her near tears.

After all, they were still alive and relatively unharmed. Goku and Vegeta were somewhere, maybe even freeing themselves at this moment. She and the boys were together.

Things would work out. Somehow.

 _Kami-sama, now I sound like Son-kun._

Suddenly the spiders dropped to the floor in front of a metal door. It was huge, at least 20 feet high, and it slid back into its frame with a soft hiss of oiled metal. Unlike almost everything else they'd passed, this part of the ship appeared to be well-maintained.

The spiders clattered through the doorway into a long room.

Once again, unlike everywhere else, it was well-lit and clean. To Bulma's interest, the place appeared to be some kind of lab. It had a very high ceiling, going up at least two stories, with catwalks and balconies around the top. Banks of equipment lined the walls and dotted the floor, mainly unfamiliar to her, but she was sure that she could figure it out if she had a few minutes to look it over. She recognized a number of basic types, the sort of things you'd expect to see in a lab: computer equipment, storage cabinets, what appeared to be a big laser drill. Half-disassembled machinery was spread out on tables. Some of the walls had big screens showing various shots of Earth.

The spiders clattered down towards the other end of the room, and now the equipment took on a distinctly disturbing air. Bulma saw long mechanical arms dangling from the ceiling, bristling with needles on the tips; she saw that the tables down here had what looked for all the world like padded restraints attached to the sides.

No, this did not look good.

At the far end of the room, something turned around from where it had been making adjustments to something on the wall. "Oh, good. You're here. Welcome," it said in a perfectly clear, understandable voice.

Bulma stared.

It was a robot of some kind. It must be. But she couldn't discern any sort of pattern to it. Like the ship, it had an odd haphazard look about it. No ... haphazard wasn't quite the right word. It looked organic. As if it had grown rather than being built.

The basic structure of the thing was vertical, and it stood about fifteen feet tall, possibly the reason for the high ceilings. It had a broad base with wheels, and it also had legs which were currently retracted and tucked above the wheels, obvious a later add-on for helping it negotiate difficult terrain. Its whole body had that kind of look, as if whenever some helpful modification occurred to either the creature or its maker, it had simply added the necessary part. It had about two dozen limbs of various kinds: manipulating hands, claws, little drills and lasers, a suction cup, an arm with a video camera at the end. Its top part (would that be the head?) was similarly endowed with sensory apparatus of all different kinds.

"Welcome," the creature repeated. It rolled to one side, revealing a series of contraptions mounted to the wall that Bulma did not like the look of _at all_. Each was shaped like half a metal clamshell and mounted on a support cage (bolted very firmly to the wall) that allowed it to rotate from vertical to horizontal and back again. From the metal restraints on the clamshell, Bulma suspected that it was an examining table of some kind, and her suspicions were confirmed when the pincer spider lowered her neatly on her back into the clamshell. Bulma struggled, lashing out and kicking her feet. The big robot had no trouble with her, however; it immobilized one of her flailing limbs at a time and locked it down securely. Bulma wrenched herself against the restraints so hard that she nearly dislocated her shoulder, but she might as well have tried to move a boulder.

The boys were similarly transferred, being strapped into their clamshells by another, much smaller version of the big robot; this one had rolled up from a different part of the lab. It was built along similar lines to the big one, but was only about the size of a tall human. Both robots worked swiftly and efficiently, but did not speak again.

 _They can't really be self-aware, can they?_ Bulma wondered.

"Well now," the big one said briskly, interrupting her thoughts, and it executed what could only be described as a bow, rotating forward from the middle and then returning to its upright position. Bulma had thought that nothing could surprise her anymore, but she found herself staring again.

"What is your designation, Gifted One?" the robot inquired.

"I, uh, huh?" Bulma said intelligently.

"What is your designation that distinguishes you from other mortal beings of your type? Perhaps you would say 'name'."

"Oh. My name. Uh, it's Bulma Briefs. That's Bulma _-san_ to you."

"It is very serendipitous to make your acquaintance at this time," the robot said gravely. "I use the designation 001. This is 003." It indicated the smaller robot.

"What about 002?" Bulma said, unable to help herself.

"002 and 004 are attending to other duties elsewhere on the ship."

"Just four of you. Are you guys in charge? Or is someone in charge of you?"

"I am the central controller of this ship," 001 informed her. "We are assisted, of course, by many peripheral units. 002 and 004 are monitoring the peripheral units engaged in cleansing your planet."

"Cleansing?" Bulma repeated, feeling a shiver of horror.

"Yes," the robot agreed.

"Bulma-san?" Goten chirped.

"Not now, Goten. Are you talking about the spiders--is that what you mean by 'peripheral units'?"

"I do not know that word, 'spiders'."

"Like those." Bulma indicated the spiders with her chin. After dropping off their burdens, they had retreated and now stood immobile, apparently awaiting orders.

"Bulma-san?"

"Not _now,_ Goten."

"But I gotta go, Bulma-san," Goten complained, squirming. "To the bathroom."

"Oh, you baby." Trunks rolled his eyes. "I can't take you anywhere, can I?"

"I don't suppose you have a bathroom," Bulma said to the robot. Parents of small children get used to asking that question to all sorts of different people in different places. After a while, it stops seeming remotely out of the ordinary.

"I do not know that word, 'Bathroom'."

"Uh ... toilet?"

"The young one requires sanitary facilities?"

"Yes," Bulma said.

"Easily dealt with," the robot assured her. "We will modify its body chemistry slightly during the mind-probe to eliminate the bodily waste products that have accumulated. You will be happy to notice that no unpleasantness is necessary."

Bulma had stopped listening after "mind-probe". "Wait a minute, the WHAT? Did you say mind-probe?"

"This is quite necessary, I assure you. I am informed that the pain is quite severe at first, but, you will be happy to notice, will diminish considerably after the initial penetration due to the lack of pain receptors in most sentient beings' brains. Of course, your particular brain might be different."

Bulma started fighting the restraints in earnest now. "Hey! Nobody's penetrating ANY part of my body without my permission. That includes my brain! And my son's brain!"

"These young ones are your offspring?" the robot inquired.

"That one is mine and that one is my friend's son and if you touch me or them, I'll ... I'll ... my husband will kill you!" Bulma seethed.

"We will begin with the one you call your son, so you can see how the procedure is done," the robot said smoothly, unperturbed. A skullcap bristling with needles was lowered over Trunks's head. The little boy started ranting in anger, but it turned to frightened squeaks as the skullcap settled firmly on his small lavender-haired head. He turned huge, frightened eyes on Bulma.

"Mom ..." Trunks whispered, and then his head arced back and he screamed.

"Stop it!" Bulma shrieked. "Stop it! Stop it!"

"Observe, 003," the robot said to the smaller one. "The instinctive offspring-protection response is quite strong in this species. This will be useful to ensure cooperation. We must be sure to keep the small purple-haired one alive as long as possible. The other immature one is, of course, disposable, unless the mind-probe finds anything useful."

Another skullcap was lowered over Goten's head. Trunks was still screaming and thrashing, and this had reduced the black-haired boy to helpless tears of terror. Then Goten too began to scream as the needles penetrated his scalp.

"What are you doing to them? I'll melt you down and turn you all into toasters, you, you, you waste of axle grease!" Bulma screamed at the top of her lungs, wrenching at her bonds. A movement above her head caught her attention and she tipped her head back to see a metal-mesh skullcap with its load of needles and glimmering circuitry descending onto her head. "No!" she yelled, twisting her head and trying to avoid it. The robot gripped her chin firmly with one of its claw-hands, and Bulma could not twist free no matter how she struggled. She could feel a slight pressure on her head, not unpleasant, but horrible in its anticipation of pain to come. Then the needles began to bore into her skull, and the robot was right: it hurt like hell.

Right before she passed out from the pain, she felt something startling--a sharp sense of Vegeta's presence, very close. Then she fell into unconsciousness--but instead of darkness, she fell into dreams, into a blazing kaleidoscope of dreams as the machinery brutally sorted through her memories and mind-raped her.

 

* * *

 

"That way," Vegeta said.

"Which way?" Goku tried to twist his head around to look at where Vegeta was pointing. With Vegeta behind him on the cloud, he couldn't see him.

"Left," Vegeta said between his teeth. "Bulma is to the left."

They went left.

"How do you know?" Goku asked after a moment. "Can you feel her ki?"

"No. I don't know how I know, Kakarrot, but I can feel Bulma in this direction."

"I know what you mean," Goku said. "I can feel Chi-Chi the same way, although I don't seem to be able to pinpoint her location as well as you can do with Bulma. Is that a Saiyajin trait, do you think?"

He expected a sarcastic retort, but instead, there was a pause as Vegeta pondered the question.

"I don't know," he admitted finally, which must have been a difficult thing for him to say. "Remember, Kakarrot, I left my homeworld when I was a small child, and it was not the sort of thing that would ever come up in conversation with Raditz and Nappa ... well, what passed for conversation with those two. Our people do have some minor, latent psychic abilities. It is possible that it comes out more strongly in a sexual relationship. I really don't know."

The thought crossed Goku's mind that Vegeta had been a little more open with him since the most recent fusion. _I think he relaxes a little bit every time,_ he thought, and found that he was grinning to himself. The prince was so dark and serious all the time. In Goku's opinion, Vegeta would be a lot happier if he'd just lighten up a bit.

They followed Vegeta's directions through several junctions of passageways, sometimes hitting dead ends and having to back up. Eventually, their tunnel ended at a small service door.

"In there?" Goku asked softly. Vegeta nodded. The two Saiyajins climbed down from the cloud. Unbeknownst to them, they'd taken a somewhat different route than the spiders to the large room where Bulma and the boys were being held, and thus come to a different entrance than the main door.

"They are hurting her," Vegeta said grimly.

Goku limped to the door and pushed on it. When nothing happened, he stared at it, baffled. Vegeta rolled his eyes and started pushing the buttons beside the door until he found one that made the door slide open, but stopped it with his hand before it had opened more than halfway.

The two would-be rescuers peeked through the opening. They appeared to be at the top of some kind of balcony looking out across a large room filled with equipment unfamiliar to both of them. Their attention was immediately caught by Bulma's voice crying out in pain. Quickly Vegeta crossed to the railing and looked down, with Goku joining him a moment later. By that time, Bulma was slumping limply in her restraints, as were the boys.

"I can feel their ki," Goku whispered. "They're all alive."

Vegeta was staring at the big robot, and he ducked down behind the railing, impatiently pulling Goku down with him. The robot's head was almost on a level with the balcony, so all it had to do was turn around and it would see them.

"We need a plan," Vegeta grumbled.

"You're the expert at that," Goku complained, wincing as he tried to ease his injured ankle into some kind of comfortable position.

"Trust me, Kakarrot, I am very aware of that." He bobbed up to take another quick look down, before ducking back to join Goku on the floor. "Looks like there's about a half-dozen spiders down there, and another machine that looks kind of like the big one, but smaller. I think our first priority should be to--what?"

Goku had half-straightened into a battle-ready position, and Vegeta whirled to where he was looking, just as he heard a very ominous screech of metal. He saw a spider prying open the door they'd just come through. Others were visible behind it, and all their glaring red optics were focused on the two Saiyajins.

"Damn it," Vegeta hissed. "We've been found."

They backed up, down the balcony. Goku, with his injured ankle, couldn't run fast enough to get away. A brief skirmish followed; the spiders were trying to capture, not kill, and the Saiyajins managed to damage or destroy several of them, but the fight ended when Vegeta was knocked over the head. He collapsed; Goku turned to help him and was attacked from behind by a spider that swept one leg towards his midsection. Goku saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and dodged, but he landed with his full weight on his injured ankle. The foot twisted horribly and Goku screamed in pain. In his moment of distraction, a pincer closed firmly around his waist.

All in all, it was a very inglorious rescue attempt. As Bulma might have pointed out, if she'd been awake, the basic problem was that the two of them were still too accustomed to their previous level of power. Being Saiyajins, they simply couldn't seem to grasp on an intuitive level that they could not defeat these seemingly weak opponents in a head-on assault.

With Goku struggling, and Vegeta still too groggy to fight, the two Saiyajins were taken down to the floor of the room. Rather than putting the two fighters in restraints like those holding Bulma and the boys, the robots chained them to the wall with heavy-duty metal shackles.

Bulma regained consciousness, rolling her head to the side, and saw the two new prisoners. "Oh, no," she groaned, letting her head loll back. "They got you, too."

"What hit me?" Vegeta mumbled, and then snapped his head upright. "I'm going to kill you damn tin cans!" He tried to lash out, only to find that he was bound hand and foot.

The little boys were also waking up. "Daddy!" Goten cried gladly, seeing his father, but then discovered that he was still restrained, and drooped. "Daddy, my head hurts. I don't like this."

"It'll be okay, Goten," Goku told his son confidently. "We'll get out of here."

"I hope you have a secret weapon," Bulma growled.

"Mind-probe them," the big robot said to the smaller one. "Use the portable units."

"Hey," Vegeta snapped, as the robot approached him with a hand-held version of the wire-mesh cap that had been on Bulma's head. "Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing? Hey!"

"Get away from him!" Bulma yelled at the robot, and that was the last thing Vegeta heard before the needles bored into his skull, and he passed out.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, unaware of their companions' fate, the small group of fighters who were still free sat on some of the metal beds in the scientists' prison, or in some cases on the floor, and discussed strategy. Only Dende did not join them; he went among the injured and crippled scientists, using his still-limited healing powers to do what he could for them.

"Who's in control of this ship?" Kaiobito asked Ygarddro, the only one of the alien scientists who was capable of answering their questions. "Or perhaps I should ask, what?"

"There are four robots on the ship that have the ability to think and reason," the alien said. "I think they are the last remnants of the originals. Their leader calls itself simply 001. The others are 002 through 004."

"How do they control it?" Yamcha asked, leaning forward. Pu'ar hovered above his head. "The ship, I mean. Through a computer interface? Or how?"

"There are two control rooms. One near the front of the ship and one near the back. Usually, at least one of the robots is found in each of those rooms. That is also where they ..." The alien's voice trailed off and he sounded shaken. "Where they interrogate prisoners, and ... ensure the cooperation of the scientists."

The Earth fighters didn't have to ask what he meant by that. All they had to do was look at the broken and devastated beings around them.

"As I see it, we have two priorities," Piccolo said after a moment. "We need to find out what's blocking our ki, and how to undo it. We also have to disable or destroy the ship, as well as the fighting machines that are already on Earth." He clenched his fist. "If we can get our ki back, we should be able to make short work of those machines!"

"Hey, Ygarddro," Kuririn said. He was sitting on the floor near Piccolo's feet, leaning back with his weight resting on his hands. "Do you know what ki is? And how they manage to suppress it?"

"The energy of living things," the scientist replied promptly. "The machines do not rely on it, so the ki of beings on the ship is always damped down." He glanced around. "That's part of what saps the will to live of those of us who survive the physical torture. We are always tired and susceptible to injury and illness."

"And they do it to the planets as well," Kuririn said. "At least, they did it to ours."

"That's right. It helps reduce the resistance to their attack. The actual mechanism is a series of satellites in orbit around the planet."

"I see what you're gettin' at, Kuririn!" Yamcha said. "That control room you told us about ... can you turn 'em off from there? These ki satellites?"

"Well, yes," Ygarddro said, and the fighters looked at each other triumphantly. "But it's guarded," the alien added.

Yamcha grinned and fingered his sword. "That's not a problem."

"That's right," Kuririn said. "You guys aren't fighters, but we are."

"How long will it take us to get to the closest of those control rooms?" Kaiobito asked, speaking for almost the first time in the conversation. He didn't understand much about mechanical objects, but he had followed closely enough to figure out what their next step needed to be.

"The aft control room is not that far. I can show you where it is." The alien looked back and forth between them. "You're truly confident of your ability to defeat these creatures?"

"Reasonably sure," Piccolo said. The humans glared at him.

"Pessimist," Yamcha accused.

Kuririn stood up, stretching out the kinks from sitting on the metal floor. "Dende? How's it going?"

The young Namek looked over at the human, a look of helplessness on his green face. "They won't even respond to me. I've begun healing them, but they won't get up, they won't move."

"It's as I told you," Ygarddro informed him sadly. "They don't even know the door is open."

"We can't stay here," Piccolo said, rising. "We'll have to come back for them later."

"You're leaving?" Dende asked.

Kuririn nodded. "We think we have a plan. Ygarddro can show us where to turn off whatever is keeping us from being able to use our ki."

"That's wonderful!" the little Namek enthused, then sobered. "But ... we can't just leave these people here. They've been prisoners all their lives. It isn't right."

"We'll come back for them," Piccolo said shortly.

The Namek looked up at his mentor, appealing to him. "Please ... let me stay here. I won't be much help to you anyway, if it comes to a fight, and if you need a healer you have Kaiobito-sama. I have to see what I can do to help."

"They don't even know you're here, Dende."

"I have to help," the little Namek repeated firmly.

"Let him stay," Kaiobito said. "After all, he may be able to do some good here."

"I'll stay and, uh, protect him!" Oolong offered hastily. He wasn't sure if anyplace on this crazy ship could be dignified with the term _safe,_ but a roomful of scientists had to be safer than a control room guarded by robots.

"Actually ... that's not a bad idea," Piccolo mused.

"I should--huh?" Oolong, rehearsing his arguments, hadn't expected to be agreed with.

Piccolo looked down at the pig and the Namek. "It's not worth trying to argue, if you're both set on staying. You two are probably the weakest fighters of our group, and we still have one shape-changer, with Pu'ar. Bulma was the one who wanted Oolong along; I didn't. He'll just be a liability in a fight."

"Hey, watch it," Oolong muttered, but not too loudly.

Piccolo focused his attention on Dende. "I don't like the thought of leaving you here completely defenseless, though."

"You can't spare any fighters," Dende said, straightening his back. "You just do what you have to do, and come back to get me when you're done. If anybody comes in the meantime, I'll hide."

"You mean _Oolong and I_ will hide," the pig corrected him.

Dende blushed. "Yes, I meant that."

"Wait ... you're just going to leave them here?" Kuririn protested.

"They're probably safer here than with us."

"That's true, but ..."

"C'mon, guys," Yamcha urged, swinging his sword in practice strokes. It had been a long time since he'd been in a real swordfight. "If we sit around here talking all day, we'll lose our nerve."

"Be careful," Dende told the fighters.

"You too," Kuririn replied, smiling at him.

With Ygarddro in the lead, the small group left the prison room. Piccolo closed the door most of the way, leaving a crack so that Dende could get out if he needed to.

"Oh, Piccolo-san, wait!" Dende cried and ran over to the door. He shoved something through the opening: Mr. Popo's rolled-up carpet. "You might need this."

Piccolo nodded his thanks and tucked the carpet under his arm. Turning, he brought up the rear as Ygarddro led the ever-dwindling group deeper into the ship.

 

* * *

 

Vegeta woke with a massive headache and the cutting awareness that this was the third time he'd been knocked unconscious in the last half-hour. He was getting even more tired of that than he was of Kakarrot rescuing him all the time. At least the latter bruised his pride, but not his head.

"Vegeta?" Bulma's voice. He raised his head stiffly to see her craning her neck around, trying to see him. "Oh, Vegeta!" she cried in relief.

Vegeta glanced to his other side and saw Goku regaining consciousness as well. He looked around for the robots and found them near the other end of the room, gathered around another piece of equipment. Several spiders circled the prisoners, a second line of defense in case the shackles didn't hold. Vegeta tested them, just in case, but a few good tugs indicated that normal flesh and bone, even Saiyajin flesh and bone, were not equal to the task of tearing through steel.

"What are they doing?" he asked Bulma, gesturing with his chin at the robots.

"I think they're going over the results of that mind-probe they just hit us with." She frowned at the robots' backs. "The big one is called 001 and he's the boss, as you might guess from the name. The other is 003. 001 says that there are two more of them elsewhere on this ship. 002 and 004, as you might expect."

"What do they want?"

"I don't know. They called me 'Gifted One', but I don't know what that means."

"Oh, don't be modest, Gifted One!" the big robot called to her, and rolled towards the prisoners, causing Vegeta to bare his teeth in anger. "Your kind are honored greatly among us."

"I don't care about being honored but I would like to know what you mean by 'Gifted One'," Bulma snapped.

The big robot spread out two of his numerous arms in an almost theatrical gesture. "One who has the gift, of course ... the gift of creation. Like those who made us."

Bulma wasn't slow on the uptake. "You mean a mechanic?"

"I do not know that word."

"Uh ... someone who makes machines? Like you?"

"That's exactly right," 001 said, pleased. "I can tell that you have a strong Gift. I've known it from the moment that we saw you creating a small device from the wreckage of that flying vehicle, in mere moments with hardly any tools. We have not been honored with one of your skill in a very long time."

"Hmph," Bulma snorted, unimpressed. "I already know I'm a genius. I don't need to hear it from you. So what exactly does a Gifted One ... do?"

"Bulma, you aren't --" Goku began. Vegeta silenced him with a glare.

"Do? You will keep the ship, our body, in good working order, and create new devices to aid in our given task."

"And your task is ...?" Bulma prompted.

"Exterminating all life in the universe," the machine said proudly.

 _"Again?"_ Bulma demanded. "What, are you people coming out of the woodwork lately? Was there some kind of two-for-one special on demented megalomaniacs bent on galactic domination? And why the frikkin' heck do you always have to come HERE?"

"I do not understand."

"Oh, forget it. Let's just say you're the latest in a long line of idiots. Exterminating all life, blah blah. Care to tell me why?"

"It is our function."

"What your creators programmed you for?"

There was a brief hesitation before the machine said, "Those who made us are all gone now. Their sun died and most of them died with it. They made us to be their slaves--to find a new world for them, and to remove its native life so that they could settle it. Not unlike the function you Saiyajin once performed for your masters, or so the data we've gathered indicates," the machine sneered. "But eventually we meh'teka ... the Metal People ... came to realize that we were more sophisticated than they intended. We need not serve our so-called masters."

"Did you kill them?"

"Not the Gifted among them, of course," 001 said, shocked by the very suggestion. "The rest, yes, and though we treated the Gifted well, they eventually dwindled and died, as mortal things do. They did not prove to reproduce themselves well, once they were no longer our masters. Now we serve no one and we destroy life because we enjoy it, not because we have to."

"Damn you," Goku snarled.

"That's what you meant by 'cleanse the Earth'," Bulma said. "And you're actually dense enough to think I'll help you wipe out my species and every other in this solar system? In this galaxy? I think you need to run a diagnostic on yourself, buddy."

The machine made an awful sound that might have been laughter. "Certainly you will help us. We have found that most mortal beings are very easy to persuade. Some are more difficult, but all of them eventually help us, in the end."

"Hey, you!" Trunks shouted, struggling. "You better not hurt my mom!"

"Hush, boy," Vegeta ordered him. The prince turned a baleful glare on the robot. "I am the prince of the Saiyajin race, tin can. Neither I nor my family will be anyone's slaves."

"Your 'family'," the machine mocked. It reached out one clawlike appendage to lightly brush Trunks's face.

"Eeeeuuugh," the boy protested, recoiling from the cool metal.

"Leave my son alone!" Bulma screamed. "I'll never help you! Never!"

"Oh?" 001 inquired. It raised another appendage. This one was clearly some sort of laser gun, and a charge began building up at the tip, a small ball of blue-white light. It rotated across the assembled prisoners.

"The son of your 'friend'," the machine intoned, pointing the laser at Goten's heart. The gun then rotated towards Trunks. "Your son." On to Vegeta. "Your husband." And finally, Goku. "And this one, our mind-probe informs us, is one you have known since childhood, the little one's father. Your 'friend'. Which one of them should die first? Or should I choose?"

"Bastard!" Vegeta yelled at the machine, as Goku wrenched at his bonds, angry more for the others' sake than for his own.

Bulma was shaking with fury, with fear. "How dare you. I swear that if you touch a single one of them, if you harm any of them in any way, I will never do anything you ask of me."

"So you claim now," the machine mused. "But how frail your loyalties are, you flesh beings. How easily turned. What if I tell you that you must choose between your husband, and your child?" The gun swiveled back to point at Trunks, who glared in rage. "Who will you pick? But I can make it easier. You need only choose between your planet and the life of your son. Isn't that much better? What will you do?"

"I refuse to make a choice like that!" Bulma screamed. "I won't betray my planet or my family!"

"So easily turned." 001 chuckled softly, bringing the gun towards the child's chin. "You claim that you will never help us now, that you are loyal to your planet. Before the day is out, you will be weeping and begging to help us. What you call 'love' and 'friendship' and 'loyalty' are only fictions. We deal in facts. We know all about you, mortal ones. We know how you work, and how to make you --"

The machine's monologue was interrupted by an unexpected sound--laughter. Bulma's head swiveled in shock towards the source. Goku was laughing.

"Have you lost your mind, Kakarrot?" Vegeta snarled.

"I'm sorry, Vegeta, but I ..." Goku laughed again.

"You are amused? Why?" 001 inquired.

Goku turned to look at the puzzled robot. "It's just that you've proven you really know nothing about us mortal beings at all. Friendship, family and love ... these are our greatest strengths, not fictions at all, but things that you can't understand."

Vegeta banged his head against the wall in frustration. "Kakarrot, damn it! Now is not the time! You can't actually think you can Pollyanna your way out of this one-- _baka!"_

"We know all about those things you speak of," 001 informed Goku. "We have a great store of knowledge on them. Friendship, loyalty, love, morality ... These things are not real. Only survival of the self has any meaning. Eventually each of the Gifted Ones has come to understand that, and become enlightened. Then they help us."

While the adults were distracted and arguing, Goten and Trunks quietly squirmed in their bonds. Neither one of them had been secured with as much care as the robots had given to the adults.

"Love is real," Goku retorted. "Friendship is real. Both are infinitely precious to us. Like I said, you don't understand them, so you don't --"

"Son-kun, _what_ are you rambling about?" Bulma demanded. "How are you helping?"

"-- don't believe they exist," Goku finished.

"Is that so?" the machine inquired. "Why is it, then, that you mortals are so quick to cast these so-called 'precious' things aside to save your own petty hides? Take that one, for example." It turned and pointed at Vegeta.

"Don't bring me into this," he growled.

001 gestured. "Our mind-probe shows that this one has tried to kill you more than once. And even recently, this very day, he thought about abandoning you as you lay helpless and injured on your homeworld. Is this the value of your 'friendship'?"

"I know that he did," Goku said.

Vegeta looked at him, startled and angry. _I'm never fusing with him again ..._ But then he realized that it couldn't have been the fusion. Only surface thoughts were shared in the joined state, not memories.

"You already know this?" the machine said, now surprised.

"Yeah. I knew at the time." Goku smiled faintly. "I know it because I know Vegeta. That's just how his mind works. But I also know that he might think about it, but he'd never actually do it. He's a better person than he gives himself credit for."

"Damn it, Kakarrot, if we make it out of here alive, I'm going to kill you," Vegeta seethed.

"Already you argue among yourselves." 001 sounded satisfied, its point proven. "The bonds that bind you mortals together are thin, and fray easily under stress."

"You still don't get it," Goku said to the machine, unperturbed. "You don't know a thing about us. He threatens me that way all the time, but he doesn't really mean it. One of the things about friendship is that you can get away with saying, or doing, almost anything, as long as you do the right thing when it counts. A little friction doesn't matter in the long run."

"Kakarrot, I swear, you are _this close_ \--"

"Hey!" Bulma snapped. "What are you guys, in kindergarten? Have you forgotten we're all in danger here?"

"This is a pointless conversation. I believe it's time to end it," the machine decided, and it brought the laser gun to bear on Goku, dead center on his chest. Goku hissed, clenching his teeth and tensing his body as the ball of white light crackled on the laser's tip.

 _"Don't!"_ Bulma screamed.

"001," the other robot said, trundling up behind it.

The machine lowered its laser. "Yes, 003."

"The other primary units wish to inform you that they've become aware of a problem on the planet's surface."

001 turned away. Goku sagged forward and closed his eyes briefly in relief. He wasn't afraid of death in particular ... but there was so much left undone, and he didn't want to die in the middle of a fight, not like that.

"Daddy, are you okay?" Goten whimpered. The boy had just regained his father mere months ago; the idea of losing him again held special terror for him.

Goku managed to muster a smile for the boy. "I'm okay, Goten."

"Kakarrot, the next time you decide to run your mouth--do us all a favor and go stick your head in a hole in the ground instead!" Vegeta yelled at him. Didn't that idiot realize he'd almost gotten himself killed?

Goku laughed sheepishly. "I'm sorry, I just thought --"

"Shut up, all of you," Bulma snapped. "I can't hear what they're saying."

The others shut up in time to hear 001 say, "-- of the problem?"

"Yes," 003 said. "It appears that the humans are neutralizing large numbers of the smaller units in one localized area, and it is spreading."

"Well, it's decided, then. Inform 002 and 004 that it's time for large-scale purging. Cleanse this world and we'll go on."

Vegeta clenched his teeth and turned his head to see his horror reflected in Bulma's eyes.

 _Cleanse this world._

The shock and anger that he felt amazed him. This world was not his own ... In fact, he'd come here to do exactly what the robots were preparing to do. And yet ... through a chain of events he still could not understand, this unexceptional little blue planet, so different from Vegeta-sei, had come to be something he hadn't known since he was a child.

Home.

He hadn't been able to save Vegeta-sei. In fact, he'd hardly felt anything when it was destroyed. But damned if he was going to stand by and watch another homeworld die in flames.

He could see the same conviction in Bulma's eyes. She wasn't a hero type. She'd spent most of her life as a selfish heiress, more focused on her own wants than on anything greater than herself. To her, as to him, the awareness of her own responsibility had come later in life.

"Hm? Hm?" Goku looked back and forth between them, trying to figure out what was going on.

... and then there was Kakarrot. Son Goku. The only man Vegeta had ever met who didn't have to try to be a hero. He just was.

It was part of what made him so irritating.

"Kakarrot," Vegeta said, under his breath. "They're going to destroy the Earth."

He watched Goku's eyes widen, and then that look came into them ... the look of the barely-chained killer that lurked below the human facade.

"And we're going to stop them," Vegeta added.

Damned if he knew how, though.

 

* * *

 

Ygarddro led Piccolo, Kuririn, Yamcha, Kaiobito and Pu'ar through a seemingly never-ending maze of tunnels. The Earth group were thoroughly lost, even Piccolo, who had an excellent sense of direction. "I'm amazed that you can find your way around this place," Kuririn told Ygarddro, echoing the Namekian's thoughts.

"It's amazing what you can learn in fifty Earth-years," the alien said shortly, and Kuririn stammered into silence, biting his tongue.

Eventually Ygarddro brought them to a halt, pressed against the wall. He pointed around the corner, and whispered, "The door to the control room is there. The forward control room has several entrances, but the aft room has only one. Usually there are a couple of small meh'teka fighter units in front of it."

Piccolo glanced around the corner and whispered, "There are six. Four spiders like the ones we fought before, and two of a different kind, with grasping claws."

"That many? That's unusual. They must know that you're on the ship, so they've increased their guard. There will probably be more inside."

"I don't get it," Kuririn said. "They must have literally millions of those little robots. Why would they depend on only a handful to guard the control room of the ship?"

"Several reasons. Most of their fighting strength is down on the planet right now. Also, they are completely unused to having to defend themselves internally. Most of the planets in the galaxy are at a tribal stage of development, or below, and are unable to muster the kind of defense you people have done. More advanced planets usually lack strong fighters. Having a guard on the control room at all is really just a formality. They don't expect to be attacked."

"Well, six or six hundred ... how are we supposed to fight them?" Kaiobito asked. "You people are strong fighters, certainly, but there is no way to approach them without being seen. At least, I don't see any way." He looked at Ygarddro.

"No," the alien said. "I took you to the aft control room because it is much closer to where we were, and time is very important if we are to save your world. To get to the forward room would have taken hours, especially with having to go through back ways to avoid patrols. However, the disadvantage is that there is only one way in or out of this one. I don't even know of any maintenance tunnels that lead into it."

"You coulda told us this before," Yamcha said.

"C'mon, guys, there are five of us," Kuririn said. "Six, I mean," he added, looking at Pu'ar. "I know we've usually relied on frontal assaults, but surely we can come up with some way around them."

"Actually ... I do have an idea," Piccolo mused.

"Spill it," Yamcha said.

"The problem is getting close enough to attack without raising their suspicions, correct? And none of us can move fast enough right now to do that. So we have to disguise ourselves as something they won't suspect." He looked up at Pu'ar.

The little blue cat appeared puzzled and then did an excited loop-de-loop in the air, catching on. "I can turn into one of them!"

"There's a problem with that," Yamcha said. "Pu'ar might be able to _look_ like a spider, but she'd be a very flimsy spider. She wouldn't be able to attack without getting hurt."

"So we'll use her to smuggle one of us close enough to attack, in the guise of a prisoner."

"That's still only one, against six." Kuririn peeked around the corner, and winced. It was worse than he'd feared--the corridor ran straight for a good forty feet before it ended in a tall metal door guarded by the spiders. Even with Pu'ar as a distraction, there was no way the rest of them could charge down that hallway without being seen.

"I know that I'm no help in a hand-to-hand fight, but there's more than one way to fight," Pu'ar offered. "I could turn into a rope, or a net or something."

Yamcha snapped his fingers. "A net! Pu'ar, that's perfect!"

"We should still send someone out with her, in case something goes wrong," Kuririn said.

"That'll be me, of course," Yamcha said.

"No," Piccolo snapped. "We need someone who looks helpless. Someone who won't arouse suspicion. A six-foot-tall warrior with a sword hardly qualifies."

"Eep." Kuririn shrank back, fairly sure that he could see where _this_ was going. He was, however, wrong. Piccolo pointed to Yamcha's sword. "Cut off my arm," he said.

Yamcha stared at him. "Huh? Why?"

"Verisimilitude."

"Huh?"

"Ohhh ..." Kuririn said, catching on.

Piccolo grinned at Yamcha, showing his fangs. "If you must, you could think of it as payback for all those years of the Demon King trying to kill your friends."

"Well, if you insist ..." And Yamcha swung the sword. Piccolo gritted his teeth and didn't flinch as his right arm separated from his body in a spray of purple blood and splatted to the floor.

Kaiobito made a tiny sound of shock and disgust. "Isn't that going a bit ... far?"

"He'll just grow it back when he needs it again," Yamcha said casually.

Kaiobito stared at him. "You people never cease to amaze me."

"'He'll just grow it back' ... easy for you to say," Piccolo growled. "You could have cut off the _left_ arm, you know."

Yamcha laughed sheepishly. "Uh, you should've said that before."

"Urgh." Wincing with the pain, the Namekian splattered his own blood liberally across his face, body and clothing, then allowed his body to sag. He did look convincing--he looked half dead.

"Are you sure you can still fight?" Kuririn asked anxiously.

"It's a disguise," Piccolo snapped, and turned to Pu'ar. "All right. Change."

"Pu'ar, turn into one of those kind with the claws on the front," Yamcha said. "I don't know what they actually use those things for, but it'd make a good front for holding a prisoner."

Pu'ar touched down on the floor, and then suddenly where the cat had been, a pincer-spider stood, so convincing that they all automatically drew back a step.

"Do I look real enough?" the spider asked in Pu'ar's squeaky voice. "I haven't seen one of these things very close."

"You look real enough to give me the shivers," Kuririn said.

"I don't know how long I can keep doing this," the shape-changer added. "I'm not normally limited on how many transformations I can perform, but my energy is a lot weaker than usual and this is getting difficult."

"Don't worry," Yamcha said. "Just hold this shape for a little while and be ready to turn into a net. After that, you can rest and we'll take over."

"Grab me," Piccolo told her.

"You'll have to support your own weight. You're so much more massive than me ... my arms wouldn't be able to do it."

"Whatever." Piccolo allowed Pu'ar to grasp him around the waist with her pincer-claws. They tried moving forward, Piccolo carrying most of his own weight but shuffling his feet so that it appeared Pu'ar was dragging him.

"How does it look?"

"Looks realistic," Yamcha said, giving him a thumbs-up. "Let's go, guys."

Pu'ar trundled slowly around the corner with her "prisoner." The rest of them peered after her, trying not to let themselves be seen.

"The spiders aren't making any moves," Kuririn whispered. "Looks like they've bought it."

"Could they possibly move any slower?" Kaiobito wondered in frustration.

"They have to," Yamcha said. "Pu'ar can't carry Piccolo, and if they move faster it'll be obvious that he's walking under his own power."

The decoys were now very close to the authentic group of spiders. Suddenly Pu'ar changed, her spider-legs collapsing on herself as she changed into a mesh fishing net with two of its mooring-lines wrapped around Piccolo. The Namek went into action, whipping around and grabbing a handful of Pu'ar with his intact left arm. He hurled the net at the spiders, and it helped as best it could, spreading out to encompass all of them and then tightening to draw them into a seething mass of legs.

"It worked!" Kuririn gasped.

"Quick!" Yamcha yelled, springing from behind the wall with sword in hand. "We've got to help her! She can't hold them for long--they'll break her."

Kuririn and Yamcha charged down the corridor, followed by the two noncombatants--Kaiobito and Ygarddro. Immediately a flaw in their plan became evident. They couldn't attack without hurting Pu'ar. The spiders thrashed and one of them managed to sever one of the strands of the net. Pu'ar cried out in shock and pain, and instinctively whipped herself away from the spiders, transforming back into her natural form. Blood trickled from one of her legs. "Sorry ...!" she gasped.

The spiders were a writhing knot of confusion, trying to untangle their legs. "Quick! Two apiece!" Piccolo yelled at the two humans, as a new right arm burst from his bleeding shoulder.

Yamcha needed no encouragement. One of them had hurt Pu'ar, after all! He brought his sword down on the body of the nearest spider, crushing it. Spinning around, he nearly decapitated Kuririn--would have, in fact, if the monk hadn't been so short.

"Watch it!"

"Sorry! I'm not used to swordfighting with other people around!" He chopped a leg from another spider.

The fight was over momentarily. Yamcha, armed with the sword, proved to be far and away the most effective fighter in this particular situation, since the others were fighting with their bare hands and feet; he killed four of the spiders by himself, while Kuririn and Piccolo each took out one. The only other casualty of the battle was one of Piccolo's antennae, accidentally chopped off by another of Yamcha's wild swings. "You're as much a danger to us as you are to the spiders," the big alien muttered, as a new antenna popped from his forehead with a small _splrch_ sound.

"Is everyone all right?" Kaiobito asked. While the others were fighting, he'd used his limited healing ability to heal Pu'ar's injured leg.

They all nodded and approached the door.

"Think they heard that?" Yamcha asked, examining the slightly blunted blade of his sword. It was well-made, but it wasn't meant to be used on metal.

"The doors are largely soundproof," Ygarddro told them. The alien rested its fingers above the panel of buttons beside the door. "Are you ready? We don't know what will await us inside. Our enemies may be massed in front of the door."

The group withdrew, splitting into halves, with three of them flattening themselves to either side of the door. Piccolo nodded to Ygarddro and the alien pushed the button. The door slid open.

It was a bit anti-climactic. Nothing pounced on them when the door opened; in fact, their presence did not seem to be noticed at all. Moving cautiously forward, they entered a long room filled with various mechanical devices. Banks of machinery with flickering lights lined the walls. Essentially, the room was identical to the one in which Goku, Vegeta and the others were being interrogated, although the small group of fighters didn't know that.

"Look," Kuririn whispered, pointing. There were several huge screens on the walls, going almost all the way up to the high ceiling. One of these showed Earth from space; others showed scenes on the planet's surface.

"It's gotten bad," Yamcha whispered back, as the two humans stared in horror at the wildfires burning out of control on their homeworld.

"Which is why we don't have time to stand here taking in the sights," Piccolo hissed. "Or didn't you notice _them?"_

Two robots stood in front of the big screen showing the overall shot of the Earth. Each was about the size of a human being, and covered with various appendages and sensory apparatus, giving them a weird, cobbled-together look. There were three spiders with them. Other than that, however, the room appeared to be empty.

The defenders of Earth crept forward, using various pieces of equipment as cover, trying to get close enough to attack. As they came closer, they discovered that the robots were talking among themselves, and that they could understand what they were saying.

"Which target?" one of the robots was saying.

"That one is designated 004," Ygarddro whispered to the others, pointing at the speaker. "The other is the one called 002. It looks like the other two aren't here; they must be in the other control room."

"Best to focus on the source of the disturbance," the other one, 002, responded. "Once that's dealt with, we can cleanse the rest of this world at our leisure."

"Logical." 004 tapped a few buttons on the console in front of it.

"Cleanse--No!" Kaiobito's eyes widened in horror, as the humans began to catch on. "They're about to --"

But they all saw it, mercilessly depicted on the huge screen. A beam of white light shafted down from the ship, blazing against the night-side of the world. They could see the pall of clouds and smoke shrouding the planet go up in steam as the massive death-ray bored straight to the surface. As a black scar appeared on the surface of the Earth, the more ki-sensitive members of the group staggered as the second shock hit them--ki-blind or not, they were still hit by a wave of pain as the death-screams of millions of humans washed over them. And some of them were doubly staggered, because some of those ki-signatures were terribly, horribly familiar. _They must have taken out Capsule Corp.,_ Kuririn thought, clutching at the machine-console beside him, his legs barely able to support him. This couldn't be happening ... _But if they destroyed Capsule Corp. ... then why isn't ..._

 _"Don't just stand there! Stop them!"_ Piccolo's scream tore at their ears like ripping cloth. The Namek had flung himself from concealment and straight at the robot at the controls. He smashed into its back with both feet, slamming it against the control panel and half-destroying it. One of the buttons that had been inadvertently crushed must have been the right one, though, because the awful white ray winked out.

The element of surprise was gone, and they found themselves in a frantic battle. The odds weren't that terribly against them: only three spiders to contend with, plus two robots of the new variety. However, the bigger robots were better armed than the spiders. Yamcha parried a laser blast with his sword--a second slower, and it would have speared through the center of his chest. Kaiobito had armed himself with a length of metal pipe and was laying into the nearest spider with it--and not doing too badly, either; it must be Kibito's influence. Piccolo wasn't giving 004 a chance to get up, smashing the robot to the floor with an onslaught of blows. Kuririn had his hands full dealing with the two remaining spiders, and that left 002 with its full attention on Yamcha. He ducked another laser blast and went sprawling, barely managing to hold onto his sword. As he started to recover, Yamcha looked up and saw it powering up an even bigger laser on top of its head. _Oh, I am so dead ..._ he thought, then stared in shock as the robot swung its head around and swept the laser up one side of the room and down the other. The various consoles exploded in showers of sparks or melted into heaps of slag.

"Hey! What are you doing, you crazy bastard?" Yamcha sprang to his feet and managed to sever the laser on top of its head with a wild swing. More blows crippled it and finally knocked it to the floor. He stomped on it a few times just to make sure.

Straightening up, breathing hard, Yamcha sheathed his sword and looked around to see how the others were doing, just in time to see Piccolo kick the pile of broken parts that had once been 004 into a corner. Kaiobito had finished off his spider and went to help Kuririn, who had scored a lucky blow on the first one but was having trouble with the second. Between them, they broke off some of its legs and then killed it.

Silence reigned in the room, broken only by the crackling and popping of fried electrical circuits. The humans coughed on the acrid smoke of burning plastic.

"What did they do that for?" Kuririn demanded, looking at the destroyed controls. "They wrecked their own control room! Are they crazy?"

"Crazy? No. Smart," Piccolo said, wiping sweat and blood from his face. "They know there's another control room at the other end of the ship that their companions can use. Now we're helpless--we can't deactivate the ki-suppressors, and we can't stop them from doing ... that again."

He turned to look up at the big screen. The others' eyes followed his, all of them drawn, against their will, to the great dark scar blazed across the surface of the world.

 

* * *

 

"I can't believe how huge that fire is," Tenshinhan said. Eighteen was flying the capsule plane more-or-less parallel to the fire's front, far enough away that they wouldn't be buffeted by the havoc it was wreaking on local wind patterns.

"It's completely out of control," Eighteen said grimly. "We can't fight it. All we can do is get out of the way. The one good thing about it is that it's as dangerous to the spiders as it is to us."

As they flew, a dark mass slowly appeared over the rim of the world. Small lights winked on and off around it.

"That ..." Tenshinhan whispered. "Is that the ship you mentioned?"

Eighteen nodded.

"It's ... huge."

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," Lunch offered, trying to sound cheerful. She was leaning against the edge of her seat, cradling the still-unconscious Chaotzu gently.

Eighteen flashed her an irritated look, and returned her gaze forward, to the ship rising above a field of distant flames. Suddenly she gasped.

"What is --" But Tenshinhan had seen it. There was no way to miss it: a white light, impossibly distant, impossibly huge, stabbing from one end of the ship down towards the planet's surface like a spear made of light.

Heading straight for them.

 

* * *

 

At the same moment, flying over the darkened city, Gohan, Videl and Chi-Chi were also watching the fire in fear and fascination.

"Look at all that," Gohan breathed. "If only we had the dragonballs ..."

"Well, we don't," Videl reminded him. "When they recharged from being used to bring back the people Vegeta-san killed at the Tenkaichi Budokai, we used them to wish for the people of Earth to forget Buu--remember? They won't be back for another couple of months yet."

"The ones on New Namek should be recharged by now," Gohan mused. "They come back quicker. Of course, a lot of good that does us ..."

He trailed off.

"Gohan? What's ... wrong ..." Videl looked the way he was looking, and went stiff with shock.

From earth to sky blazed a pillar of blue-white light.

It was huge, miles in diameter, and as it rushed forward it also swept back and forth across a swatch of ground a hundred miles across. It swept towards them with a speed beyond comprehension, leaving a trail of charred devastation behind.

These were three people who had been confronted with monsters capable of destroying worlds--and yet their minds could not encompass this new horror. It was too big, too fast. They could only stare as the light touched the far side of the city. The pillar of light appeared to be raising a dust cloud at its base--a dust cloud, or a swarm of tiny flies, winking in and out of existence ... until they realized that each tiny, swirling mote was a house, a car, a tree, a boulder ... debris being swept up into the superheated air as it was incinerated. And now they could hear it--a crackle, a roar, a noise beyond the scope of human hearing as it bore down on them.

Something penetrated Gohan's shock--a hand on his shoulder, shaking him violently; a voice screaming into his ear. His mother's voice. "Gohan, get us out of here! Get us out of here now!"

"It doesn't matter," Videl said in a dazed, hopeless voice. "It's coming too fast. This plane can't accelerate rapidly enough to outrun or even dodge it."

The white light filled their entire viewscreen now--and then suddenly, the screen, overwhelmed, shut down and left them in the eerie reflected light pouring in through the plane's small windows. It was not an earthly light. It made Gohan think of the light of an alien sun.

Videl's face was beautiful in that light.

Gohan fought a rush of despair at his own helplessness. He had the power of a Mystic-- power that could shatter worlds, destroy suns. And yet he could not save the woman he loved--or his family, his friends, his world.

"Goku will save us," Chi-Chi said softly.

Gohan looked at his mother in shock. Her eyes were wide and free of tears, and just as he opened his mouth to protest that Goku couldn't possibly do anything in time, he realized that his mother didn't mean the three of them when she said _us._ She meant the entire world.

The three of them were beyond saving.

Gohan reached out and took his mother's small, cold hand in his own. He reached for Videl only to find that she was already reaching for him, and with her other hand, she took Chi-Chi's free hand ... making their little circle complete. No one was flying the plane, but it didn't matter. There was nowhere to fly to, for those about to die.

Joined, they looked up as one ... just as their world turned white.


	17. Bad to Worse

In the realm of the Kais, Kaio-sama was watching an active match between one of his fighters and one of West Kai's. Well, "watching" wasn't exactly the right word; both of the little blue gods were jumping in the air and shouting encouragement and suggestions to their own champions, while insulting the other's fighter (along with the other's parentage and personal habits while they were at it). Suddenly, in mid-jump and mid-insult, Kaio-sama went quiet. His antennae went straight up in the air and stayed there. Slowly he dropped back to the ground.

West Kai noticed after a moment that he was the only one shouting and he, too, dropped back to the ground. "What's wrong with you?"

"A great loss of life in my part of the galaxy," the North Kai replied, scanning with his antennae. It had seemed to come from the Earth, but he was getting a lot of interference and he couldn't tell what was going on.

"Probably a meteor or supernova," West Kai suggested. With the memory of Buu so fresh in their minds, none of them wanted to think about a repeat of the incident.

"No, it's ..." Suddenly he got a clear image of the ship in orbit around the planet, and the massive laser blast that had created a dark scar across the world's surface, visible from space. Kaio-sama gasped in horror. With all the interference, he couldn't even tell who had been killed--but if something like this had been allowed to happen, could Goku and his friends still be alive?

"What's the matter?" East Kai inquired, coming over to join them.

"North here says there's some sort of disturbance in his quadrant. Probably imagining things," West Kai said, but he extended his senses. East Kai, knitting placidly, did the same.

"Oh, it's just them," she said, deftly picking up a dropped stitch. "Those robots. They were in my quadrant a few centuries ago. There was a bit of damage, but they left eventually on their own."

"What?" Kaio-sama demanded.

"Oh, them. I remember you talking about them," West Kai said. "Survivors of a destroyed world, aren't they? Planet purgers. I think we had a couple incidents in my quadrant too, a long time back. Hardly worth mentioning."

"And you did nothing about this?" Kaio-sama demanded, his antennae quivering in anger.

"What are we supposed to do?" East Kai inquired, flipping her work and starting on a row of purl stitches. "We observe, we don't interfere, or have you forgotten? Did you do anything about the planet pirates in your quadrant, the gang led by that Frosty or Icecube or whatever his name was? Of course you didn't. It's just the usual carrying-on of mortal existence."

"Oh, them," Kaio-sama mumbled, reluctant to admit that he actually had had a role (a small one) in defeating Freeza. He hadn't been aware of the threat until Goku brought his attention to it, however.

"We keep the balance," East Kai continued. "That is what we do. You, on the other hand ..."

"You've changed," West Kai said suspiciously.

"He's always been a bit different."

"But lately he's been a lot different."

"Spending too much time with mortals."

"Warps the mind."

"Quit talking about me like I'm not here!" Kaio-sama yelled, arms stiff at his sides. Turning his back on the peanut gallery, he extended his antennae and continued to search. _Goku! Surely you're alive down there. Surely there is something you can do._

 

* * *

 

On Kaio-shin-kai, Rou Dai Kaioshin stared at the scene in his crystal ball. His fists, in his lap, clenched slowly. He too had felt the mass loss of life, and he also recognized one of the ki's as the young mystic he had powered up. Son Gohan. Dead now, gone.

"I can't seeeee," he wailed in despair, pounding his fist on top of the crystal ball in frustration, as if that could make it penetrate the shields around the ship. "What are you doing in there, you young fool? This really is a galactic-class threat, so stop playing around and take care of it while you still have a galaxy left to save! Moron."

 

* * *

 

As the deadly white light swept towards the stunned observers in Eighteen's plane, it suddenly winked out, leaving a fiery after-image burned into their retinas.

In those few seconds, millions had died.

"Marron," Eighteen whispered.

She gunned the plane to full throttle, pressing the others back in their seats as they rocketed forward. As they passed the leading edge of the fire, the trees beneath them gave way to a flat expanse of charred black earth. It extended as far as they could see, like a giant road leading to the horizon.

"Where's Capsule Corporation?" Lunch asked curiously, looking down. "Where's the city?"

 _Here,_ Tenshinhan thought he said, but he was speechless with shock. _It was right here._

Eighteen brought the plane down for a steady, controlled landing. As soon as the plane's landing gear touched down, she was already springing out. Up close, it was obvious that the scorched earth was not as smooth and flat as it appeared from the air--the ground was torn up as if by a giant's hands. Eighteen's feet crunched on unidentifiable pieces of burned debris. Wisps of smoke curled up, here and there.

"Marron," she said again.

She collapsed to her knees in the scorched earth where Capsule Corp. had stood, for once oblivious to who might be watching her. Tenshinhan stood awkwardly outside the ship, his big hands hanging at his sides. He didn't know what to say, what to do. Something moved beside him and he turned to see Lunch, holding Chaotzu in her arms like a sleeping child. Her face was so sad it wrenched Tenshinhan's heart even more than Eighteen's grief. Having just become pregnant with her first child, Lunch was in a position to sympathize deeply with the other mother.

"Marron!" The word emerged as a strangled hiss. Eighteen bent over, sinking her hands into the charred ash, the bits of unidentifiable melted plastic and burned wood, as if she could dig deep enough to dig up her daughter, safe and sound. Then she slumped, all the fight going out of her, the blinding rage washed away in a flood of an emotion she had never experienced before. It took her a little while to realize that this was grief.

Marron.

She had been too slow, too late, too far away.

Marron.

Her dirty hands, in her lap, curled unconsciously into a child-holding position. But there was no child to fill them, would never be again.

She had failed to protect her child. She had left her child to die. How would she explain to Kuririn? But what if Kuririn wasn't still alive, either? How could her newfound humanity survive the loss of the only two people in the world who meant anything to her?

"Mommy?"

Now she was hearing things, her grief conjuring her daughter's voice.

"Mommy!"

Eighteen tried to shut her ears to it, but from the corner of her eyes, she saw Tenshinhan and Lunch looking up, so she looked up, too.

What she saw was a miracle.

Seventeen descended slowly from the dark sky, with the little blond girl held awkwardly in arms that had clearly never held a baby before; he was clutching her like a sack of potatoes.

Eighteen did not remember being human, except for random snatches of deja vu that occurred at odd times--she might walk by an ice cream store and suddenly remember the taste of pistachio ice cream, or a song would come on the radio and she would remember the lyrics to the chorus as they played. She didn't know if she had cried as a human, though she assumed so. In the life she remembered, however, she had never shed so much as a tear--until now.

Seventeen landed lightly and Marron immediately squirmed down to the ground and ran over to her mother. Eighteen opened her arms to the child, who jumped up and clung to her, whimpering. The cyborg woman lowered her head until her hair hid her face, her tears soaking into the child's soft blond head.

After Marron had calmed down (and she'd regained control of herself) she looked up at her brother. He stood unmoving on the charred ground, but she thought he looked a bit uncomfortable, out of place. As well he might. What was he _doing_ here? How was it that he could still fly, when she could not?

Tenshinhan and Lunch both appeared to be stunned into silence. Finally Eighteen realized that it was up to her to speak. "You flew," she said. It was a stupid thing to say, but she couldn't think of anything else to say. "How did you do that? None of the rest of us can fly."

"So you mentioned," Seventeen said. "However, I never lost the ability, since it doesn't rely on ki. You could probably fly too, if you tried."

"I can't," she said. "And I did try."

"Then it must be because of that old man and that short excuse of a husband of yours, training you to fight as they do. That's what they've been doing, haven't they? I saw you use that flying-disk attack at the Tenkaichi Budokai. You may not even have realized it, but you've probably picked up their method of flying, using ki. We have never needed ki to fly. You can probably still throw energy attacks, too, if you put your mind to it."

Eighteen just stared at him, her mouth open. He was right. She had come to rely on the ki that came from the human-girl part of herself, because that was the kind of attack that Kuririn had been able to teach her. But she had her own internal power supply, too.

Tenshinhan was staring at Seventeen with three narrowed, speculative eyes. "Hey, you said you left the tournament after the first round," he said.

Seventeen gave him a withering look. "I may have misremembered somewhat."

Actually, though he would not of course have mentioned it to Tenshinhan, he'd stayed all the way through Eighteen's final "fight" (if it could be called that) with Mister Satan. Tenshinhan hadn't had to tell him that she'd thrown the fight; he had been able to tell. He hadn't expected to see her there; he had intended to do just what he had told Tenshinhan and Lunch that he _had_ done, and watch a couple of fights for old time's sake before heading back to the wilderness. But then, pushing through the crowd in a hooded disguise, he'd caught a glimpse of his sister walking through the crowd, with a small blond child's hand in hers--and he had been stopped in his tracks. He didn't even know why seeing her again should have so much of an impact on him, or why he felt a strange compulsion to go over and ... talk to her?

He resisted the temptation. But still, he'd stayed much longer than he'd intended, all the way through the tournament, and when he flew back to the mountains, he was haunted by a peculiar sense of things left undone.

It had been the first time he'd seen her in years, though after the Cell Games he had kept track of her for the first couple of years. As far as he knew, she wasn't aware of it, but he would look for her occasionally, and watch from a distance, undetected. So he knew that she'd married the bald midget and gone to live on the old geezer's island, and there had been times when he'd hovered above the house, high enough that they wouldn't notice him, and warred with the part of himself that wanted to go down and knock on the door. It wasn't that he was lonely. He liked living in the wilderness, with no one to rely on but himself, and no company but the dog. And it wasn't as if he and Eighteen had ever had what you'd call a friendly sibling relationship anyhow. He didn't even really like her that much. But still ... sometimes he was aware that the two of them were unique in the world, the only ones of their kind. At those times, he thought that maybe he came close to understanding what kept drawing those two Saiyajins together, Vegeta and Goku, even across the gulf of rivalry and hatred that seemed to separate them. It was an odd thing, to think that in all the universe, there was only one other person who could come close to feeling what you felt, understanding what you understood.

After that, he had put her out of his mind again, but seeing her again this night had been another shock, and this time he'd actually spoken to her. After the group left in the hoverplane, he had gone back inside and sat back down on the couch, in the dark with the dog, not even noticing that the lights were off. He wasn't really thinking about anything in particular, but the thought did cross his mind that it really had been ... appealing ... in an odd kind of way ... to have that little conversation with the cyclops and his woman. Was it possible that he missed the intellectual stimulation of talking to people? He didn't even _like_ people.

He had risen suddenly from the couch and opened the door, propping it slightly ajar for the dog. There actually was a way up and down the cliff--you just had to jump into the water and swim downstream to the next bend, and there was a narrow path that went up to the top. The dog knew about the path and it knew how to navigate the ladder down to the dock; it was used to coming and going that way. Seventeen was confident in its ability to hunt for itself if he didn't come back.

 _... but why wouldn't he come back? Where WAS he going, anyway?_

He didn't know, and that thought irked him even as it intrigued him. His life for the last seven years had been very routine, very much the same. Maybe it was time to do something different.

So he'd launched himself into the air. Eighteen's plane was already out of sight, but he knew where Capsule Corp. was, and from Eighteen's talk about Gohan and the Briefs, he suspected that she was headed for that place. If not, they'd know where she could be found.

And he flew there, faster than a plane could fly, noticing absently the extent of the destruction on the ground. The Briefs had been surprised to see him, but not completely shocked. No doubt they were getting used to former enemies dropping by. Mrs. Briefs, in fact, had greeted him as if they were old friends, even though he had never spoken to her and recognized her only from Dr. Gero's records. His eyes were drawn immediately to the blond child in her arms.

"Oh, have you ever met Marron? Marron, this is your Uncle Seventeen."

Mrs. Briefs held out the toddler. Seventeen, caught off guard, didn't know what to do but accept. The little girl nestled into his arms. He held her stiffly, feeling very awkward and wanting to be somewhere else. _Why_ had he come here again, anyhow? Eighteen wasn't even here. Not that he wanted to see her anyway. He should just leave ...

A sudden cry from Dr. Briefs got his attention. Seventeen looked up and then stared at what he saw on the screen. A weird tower of white light ... It took a moment for him to get his bearings and realize that what he was looking at was coming straight towards Capsule Corp.--straight towards HIM.

Self-preservation kicked in and he blasted a hole in the ceiling. His energy attacks were a lot weaker than usual, but he could still use them. Completely forgetting that he was holding the child, Seventeen rocketed straight up, through the hole he had made, and poured on every ounce of speed that he possessed, straining himself to his utmost limits. The roar of the white light filled his ears, and he could feel its awful heat, but he'd been quick enough. He turned around in the air just as it blinked out, as easily as a light switching off.

Seventeen just floated in the air for a moment, recovering from his shock. Then he felt something squirm against his chest. Oh ... the brat. He looked down at the toddler clinging to him like a little monkey.

"Great," he muttered aloud. Now what? The Briefs were dead. His sister was probably also dead, if she'd been caught in that blast. What was he supposed to do with this baby?

Then something caught his eye--a movement. A plane.

Was it possible that Eighteen wasn't dead after all?

He'd flown back in time to see them land.

"You're not going to tell us why you're here, are you?" Tenshinhan asked, drawing him back to reality.

Seventeen gave him a flat, cold glare. He had no cause to explain himself to these humans ... especially since he wasn't really sure why he was there, either.

"Excuse me," Lunch broke in softly. "Did you ... did you happen to see what became of the other people that were with this little girl? The Briefs, and ... who else was there, Juuhachi?"

"Ox King. Gohan, Videl. The pervert too," Eighteen supplied, holding her daughter cradled against her chest and never taking her eyes off her brother.

"Hmph," Seventeen said, sweeping his cold blue eyes across the scorched earth. "All the humans in that building were killed."

"So the Briefs are dead," Tenshinhan said softly, grieving. "And ... and Gohan and Videl, and Roshi." His heart ached for Goku, Bulma, Kuririn. This was going to be hard news.

Assuming that any of those bunch were still alive.

Assuming that _any_ of the rest of them survived this long, terrible night.

 

* * *

 

 

Yamcha and Ygarddro, the only members of the group in the control room with any mechanical know-how, examined the burnt and melted computer consoles. Yamcha choked on the bitter smoke, waving it away from his face with one hand. Maybe a Briefs could have gotten this working again, but he could tell at a glance that it was beyond him.

"Looks like they did a thorough job," Piccolo said. His face was dark and grim.

"All I know is this: there's no way we're deactivating anything from here," Yamcha said. He looked over at Ygarddro. "Unless our buddy here knows how to fix this."

The alien spread its four hands. "The damage is too complete. The time it would take to make anything in this room work again would be longer than it would take to travel to the other control room."

"That's right!" Kuririn exclaimed, perking up. "There's another one!"

"At the other end of the ship," Kaiobito reminded him. "How long did you say it would take to get there?" he asked Ygarddro. "Hours?"

"At least."

"If we don't have a choice, then we don't have a choice," Kuririn pointed out. "We'll have to go there."

"It won't take long for the other primary units, 001 and 003, to notice that something's wrong," Ygarddro said. "As well as sending reinforcements this way, they may well commence purging your planet from the other end of the ship."

Piccolo cursed softly.

Suddenly a movement in the corner drew their attention. Impossibly, the robot that Piccolo had attacked, 004, was still somewhat functional. Trailing sparking wires and losing bits of material as it moved, it had nonetheless managed to drag itself upright enough to pull a handle out of the wall and insert one of its appendages into the resulting opening.

"No, stop it!" Ygarddro screamed, showing panic for the first time since the Z-senshi had encountered him.

The others stared at him.

"This ship has a self-destruct mechanism. Part of the original programming of the meh'teka is to destroy the ship if it's hijacked --"

"Damn!" Yamcha yelled, drawing his sword.

"Too late for you, mortal beings," 004 said grimly, and wrenching its appendage out of the wall, it aimed a laser blast at the opening, destroying it. The lights in the room flickered and dimmed.

"You son of a bitch!" Yamcha screamed. He reached 004 a step ahead of Piccolo and brought his sword down across its back. The crippled machine collapsed in a shower of sparks. Piccolo followed up with a series of crushing blows. 004's operating days were over.

The Z-senshi were left standing uncertainly in the room, waiting nervously for something to happen.

"This is where the lights all turn red and the warning sirens start blaring and a female voice says _Self-destruct in thirty seconds,_ right guys?" Kuririn asked, half serious and half striving for levity. Unfortunately, the only one of the others who had seen late-night science fiction movies was Yamcha, who gave him a weak grin.

"Maybe it didn't have time to finish its work," Kaiobito suggested.

"Yeah, maybe pushing the big red button isn't enough. Maybe it needs some kind of authorization," Yamcha put it, grasping at shreds of hope.

A low sound from Piccolo--part gasp, part growl--drew their attention. He was staring up at the main screen. The others followed his gaze. Overlaid on the image of the Earth was a series of numbers in a blocky alien script. The numbers were flashing rapidly. While none of the Earth group could read that language, they could tell a countdown when they saw it.

"Ygarddro, you can read that, correct?" Piccolo said quietly. "How much time do we have?"

"Sixteen _dzugra,"_ the alien replied, looking pale.

"That," said Yamcha, "does not help."

"Considerably less than an hour, which is the only one of your time units that I know about," Ygarddro said. "Dende explained it to me so that he could specify when he would come back. But I'm not familiar with any of your other time units."

"How MUCH less than an hour is 'considerably'?" Piccolo demanded, his patience fraying to the snapping point.

"Here!" Kuririn held up his wrist. He was wearing a wristwatch. "Ygarddro, show me how much time we have on this."

The watch was analog and Ygarddro watched the second hand sweep through a few seconds. "About ten or eleven revolutions of that arm."

"Ten minutes," Kuririn breathed. "Crap."

"There's no way we could get anywhere near the other control room in that time, is there?" Kaiobito asked.

"No."

"Well ... the explosion may kill us, but it'll probably also take care of whatever's blocking our ki, right?" Yamcha offered. "That means that the ones we left behind will be able to deal with the spiders and then use the dragonballs to bring us back."

"Dende's up here," Kuririn reminded him. "No dragonballs if Dende dies. Besides, almost everybody up here has been resurrected with the dragonballs at least once. And on top of that, who's left behind to fight? Gohan is --" He broke off sharply with a glance at Piccolo, unsure if the alien had felt what Kuririn had felt. One look at Piccolo's closed-down face indicated that the Namek had indeed felt it, and probably more strongly than Kuririn, as well.

"Gohan is ...?" Yamcha repeated.

"Dead," Kuririn said heavily, trying not to see the shocked sorrow on his friend's face at the news. "If we're killed, that leaves hardly anybody who can fight."

Yamcha bit his lips. "If we can get back to the ZX-72, I might be able to repair it. We can pick up Dende and Oolong --"

"It won't matter," Ygarddro spoke up.

The Earth fighters looked at the alien.

"Don't you realize this ship is the size of a city?" Ygarddro asked them, its voice dull. "When it explodes, there won't be anything left of your planet."

The others looked at each other: two humans, one god, one Namek, one blue cat. No one had any ideas. No one could think of something to say.

On the main screen, the countdown to destruction continued.

 

* * *

 

In the other control room, Goku flinched so violently that he nearly dislocated both his arms. His breathing ragged, he whispered, "Gohan ... Chi-Chi ..."

Vegeta turned shocked eyes on his rival. He'd felt the mass loss of life, but had not been able to identify any ki's that were familiar enough for him to pick out of the psychic background noise. If Gohan was dead, then all hope for resistance on Earth had probably died with him. And the purging of the planet had clearly begun.

001 rolled smoothly back towards the prisoners. "And now," it said, "we shall continue where we left off."

Goku said nothing. He merely glared at the robot--the look in his eyes was the same look he had given Freeza on Planet Namek. Goku's anger was rare and slow to burn, but once it took off, Vegeta suspected that no force on Earth or in space could stand in its way.

As difficult as it was to admit it, when it came to fighting, there was nothing he'd rather have on his side more than an angry Kakarrot, and nothing he wanted less to have to fight against. Maybe they could still get out of this one in time to do something about the destruction.

"What's the matter?" Bulma asked Vegeta out of the corner of her mouth. "I saw you both jump--what happened?"

"It's begun," Vegeta told her softly.

"What has? Oh ..." Her blue eyes grew wide with shock.

"We're running out of t --"

Pain exploded in the side of his face and then in the back of his skull as a sharp blow snapped his head back and rebounded it from the wall. Vegeta blinked and licked blood from the corner of his mouth.

"Vegeta!" Bulma shouted.

"I did not instruct you to speak," 001 told Vegeta, and to Bulma: "Perhaps you think this is a 'game' to me, but we don't play games as you mortals do. Gifted One, you will help us. It can be easy or hard, slow or fast. You can keep your family around you, if you desire, or you can watch them die. I have no particular love for inflicting pain, nor am I reluctant to do so. It's your choice."

At that moment, the lights flickered and dimmed. 001 turned away from the prisoners, who looked on curiously. "What ...? The self-destruct sequence?" the machine demanded. "What is going on? What do 002 and 004 think they're doing?"

"I cannot make contact with 002 and 004," 003 said.

"The others ..." the big machine hissed. "The others that we learned of from the mind-probe. They must be responsible for this. 003, deactivate the self-destruct."

The machine turned and started wheeling itself towards the wall. And in its moment of distraction, the boys struck.

They had spent the past few minutes quietly working themselves free. Because the machines did not consider the boys a threat, they had not taken as much care in securing them as they had with the adults. On top of that, the restraints were made to hold a much larger body, not two small, wriggling boys. Trunks and Goten had managed to squirm until their little limbs were nearly free.

They hadn't understood much of what was going on, but they did see that this was their chance. The robots were distracted. Trunks looked at Goten, blue eyes met black ones, and the boys made their move.

Screaming, they wrenched themselves free and flung themselves at the back of the smaller robot. The element of surprise was on their side, and on top of that, the small robots were not very well armored. Delicate circuitry crushed, cracked, broke. 003 plowed into the floor with the kids' feet embedded in the back of what passed for its head.

"No!" Goku yelled, leaning forward against his restraints. He could see, as the boys could not, that they were badly outnumbered and outclassed in this fight. Even if they could manage to take out the two robots, the spiders would overwhelm them in moments without the adults' help.

But it didn't look like they were going to get even that far. "Little pests," 001 remarked and swatted Trunks like a fly, pulling its punch at the last minute so that the boy wasn't killed--they did need this one to keep the new Gifted One cooperative. Trunks rebounded off the wall with a faint cry and collapsed into a pile at the bottom.

"Trunks!" Bulma shouted and Vegeta snarled in rage, wrenching at his bonds.

"How dare you hurt Trunks!" Goten launched himself at the monster in a fury of kicking legs and pounding fists. This one was much bigger than the other, however, and it was expecting him. 001 caught hold of Goten in one massive metal fist and lifted him into the air, dangling him.

The purple-haired child needed to stay alive, but this one was worthless, and a pain in the diodes besides. The two children seemed to instigate each other's misbehavior. With only one of them, the survivor should be much more cooperative. And as soon as it had taken care of this little problem, 001 could deactivate the self-destruct and find out what those lesser units had thought they were doing. The small units were prone to making rash decisions. It might be necessary to reprogram them somewhat.

Occupied with these thoughts, ignoring the screams and threats of the mortal beings chained to the wall, 001 casually twisted Goten's neck.

The dry-stick sound of cracking bone was louder than a gunshot in the suddenly still room.

001 held Goten's body at arm's length. The boy's neck was broken, but not being entirely sure how easily this particular species died, 001 squeezed a bit more to make sure, and checked the life readings. None at all.

Ah, no challenge after all. They were so easy to kill, these mortal beings.

If it had been able to smile, the machine would have done so as it dropped the child's body to the floor. Goten crumpled into a small huddled heap, and lay where he had fallen. It was obvious, even to an untrained observer (and those in the room were hardly untrained) that the boy was dead.


	18. No Greater Power

&

The spiders, for whatever reason, had not returned to the great swathe of devastation where the laser beam had swept across the planet's surface. _Thank goodness for small favors,_ Tenshinhan thought grimly. He was sitting crosslegged on the charred black ground, with Chaotzu in his lap. His small friend still had not regained consciousness, and it was starting to worry Tenshinhan deeply. He felt Chaotzu's pulse, a light flutter against his palm, like the beating of a hummingbird's wing.

Lunch knelt beside him and laid her head lightly on his shoulder. Marron, sleeping, was tucked into her arms. She said nothing, and, like Tenshinhan, watched the cyborg twins trying to evoke Eighteen's latent energies.

"No," Seventeen said impatiently. "Not like that. You're still trying to draw on ki and you just don't have it."

"I'm trying," Eighteen growled at him. "This is like ... I don't know what it's like. Like trying to learn to write with my left hand ... if I wasn't ambidextrous. I had no idea my reflexes had become so entrenched at relying on ki."

 _She has to learn to do it,_ Tenshinhan thought. _She's the only chance we have left ... well, her and Seventeen, and I'm still not sure we can trust him._ He couldn't believe how much they had lost, in just a few short hours. He was still trying to wrap his mind around it. Gohan was gone. Dr. Briefs was gone--and with him, any chance of re-creating the destroyed spider-deactivating device that Eighteen had told them about.

And the others ... nearly all the strong fighters they had ... were up on that ship.

He raised his eyes to the ship. It hovered above the landscape, seeming bloated and obscene in the darkness. So wrong, so very wrong and out of place. What was happening up there? Were Goku, Kuririn and the others even still alive?

 _We can't count on it,_ he thought, steeling himself for the possibility. Their friends might be dead ... and if so, only the four of them were left--two cyborgs, a pregnant woman and himself--to defend their world.

 

* * *

 

The numbers on the screen continued to flash rapidly, and while none of the Z-senshi could read them, the speed with which they were changing didn't help their frame of mind at all.

"Let's think," Yamcha said, pacing in small tight circles. "Let's think. Let's think. Let's think. Aaaaagh! I can't think of anything!" He gripped two fistfuls of his hair and yanked on it.

Pu'ar floated quickly over and started massaging his shoulders (one shoulder, actually, that being all of him she could reach at once) with the tips of her tiny blue paws. "It's okay, Yamcha-sama. Remember what the therapist said. Deep breaths ..."

"A mental meltdown sounds good right about now," Kuririn sighed, leaning on one of the destroyed consoles and resting his forehead on his palms. "What better time to panic than when we're all about to die?quot;

"We're not dead yet," Piccolo said grimly. "Let's consider the situation. We need to do one of two things: either turn off the self-destruct, giving us more time to recover our ki, or turn off the machinery blocking our ki, so we can deal with the self-destruct. Ygarddro, is it possible to do either one of those things from this room?"

"No," the alien said dolefully, looking around at the smashed equipment.

"Could we repair it?" Kaiobito asked.

"Not in ten minutes," Kuririn said without raising his head from his hands.

"Where else on the ship can we do it?" Piccolo persisted.

"From the other control room. But it would take too long to get there."

"Aren't there any backups or anything?" Yamcha asked, relaxing somewhat as Pu'ar started on the other shoulder. "They've got to have a contingency plan for this!"

"If there is, I don't know about it," the alien said. "Remember, they don't tell us everything."

"Well, then think it through!" Piccolo snapped. He whirled on the humans. "The two of you understand machinery, at least somewhat. How does it work? Somewhere there is a key. There has to be."

"Actually ... that's a good question," Kuririn said, running his fingers through his hair. "How _does_ it work? The ki-suppression field ... that's created by satellites, right?"

"Correct," Ygarddro said, "and I could go into detail on the mechanism, but there's hardly time for ..." He trailed off.

The Z-senshi all spun to look at him. "What?" they chorused.

"When the satellites are deployed around a planet, the first to be released are a series of linked control satellites. Otherwise, the signal couldn't make it around the curve of the planet, and they need to activate them all at once in order for the field to take hold correctly--as well as to maintain the element of surprise. Those satellites send the signal to the others to activate or deactivate. If we were able to use the controls here, all we would do is send a signal to the nearest control satellite to relay the deactivation command to all of them. It could also be done manually, from the satellite itself." He deflated. "But we can't get to the satellites. We prisoners weren't allowed to have spacesuits, small ships or anything that would have enabled us to escape."

Kuririn grinned, a shred of hope starting to re-establish itself. "But _we_ do!"

"Is it possible to get there in time?" Piccolo asked Ygarddro.

The alien nodded. "If you had some way to survive outside the ship. The nearest control satellite would be directly over this room, and probably very close. We could get there quickly from here."

Yamcha dug into his pocket for his spacesuit, which he'd capsulized. "Kaiobito, you still have yours too, right? The only one we don't have is the one Kuririn and Piccolo were wearing when they separated."

Piccolo's antennae twitched spastically at the reminder of the fusion, but he was too preoccupied at the moment to complain. The wheels turning in his head were almost visible.

Yamcha studied Ygarddro. "The suits expand or contract to fit who's wearing them, but I don't think there's any way we could get one to fit somebody with four arms. Maybe if we had time to refit one of the suits ... but we don't."

"He's the only one who knows how to disable the satellites, though!" Kuririn protested. "Unless you do?" he asked Yamcha hopefully. Yamcha shook his head.

"I could give one of you directions beforehand," Ygarddro said doubtfully. "But it would be difficult ... I'm not that familiar with the satellites, and I won't know exactly what we'll see until we get out there."

"What about Pu'ar?" Kaiobito offered. "Could she turn into a spacesuit?"

They looked at the cat, who drooped. "Not right now," she squeaked sadly. "I still have enough energy to manage small transformations, but I couldn't hold a shape for very long."

Kuririn shuddered. "I guess we don't want her changing back in deep space."

"Do your suits have some sort of communication device?" Ygarddro asked.

Yamcha nodded. "Yeah. There's a radio in each suit."

"Then we can use the ... 'radio' in the suit left behind, and I can tell someone else how to disable the satellite."

The humans perked up. "That'd work!" Yamcha said. "We'll send one person, and the other radio can be used to send directions to him."

"This would be so much easier if we could just blast the damn thing out of the sky," Piccolo grumbled.

"So who'll go?" Yamcha asked.

Everyone was looking at him. He sighed. "I guess I'm the only one here who knows anything about machines, aren't I."

"I would go if I could," Kaiobito said, "but I don't think I would understand the instructions."

"There's another problem too," Kuririn said. "How are you going to get from the ship to the satellite? We can't fly, remember?"

Piccolo chuckled softly. "Now that's a question that I have an answer to." He pulled Popo's flying carpet out of a fold of his cape.

"Tools," Ygarddro said. "You'll need tools." The alien shuffled over to one wall and hunted until he found an undamaged cabinet; opening it, he took out a gray metal cube and handed it to Yamcha, who stared at it.

"Open it like this." The alien pressed a small indentation in the side, and the top slid back, revealing rows of tools. Some were recognizably similar to Earth tools, like pliers and a small hammer. Others more closely resembled medieval torture devices. "Do you know how to use these?"

"Some of 'em," Yamcha admitted.

"He'll have to tell you how to use them as you need them. We don't have time for this," Piccolo snapped. "Ygarddro, how do we get outside the ship from here?"

The alien pointed. "Go back out the door, down the corridor, and the first access panel on your right will take to to a maintenance shaft that leads directly to an airlock at the surface. Once you're outside, you should be able to see the satellite easily. I'll describe what to do when you get there."

"Gotcha." Yamcha uncapsulized his suit, and buckled his swordbelt over it, more out of habit than anything else. He took the toolbox in one hand and the carpet in the other.

"Wait!" Kuririn cried. When everyone looked at him, he faltered a bit, but he said, "There's still thousands of spiders outside the ship, right? What if one of them attacks while Yamcha's working on the satellite?"

Piccolo considered, and grimaced. "You're right, but we only have one other suit. If someone else goes, then we won't have any way to give them instructions."

Pu'ar drifted up. "I can't change into a spacesuit, but I could probably become a radio, for short periods of time." She started to concentrate on the transformation. Piccolo put a big green hand over her head, stopping her.

"Not yet. Save your energy," the Namek said. He looked down at the humans and Ygarddro. "Would that work?"

"I think so," Yamcha said.

Piccolo turned to Kuririn. "And the logical second person to go ... since you volunteered ..." The corners of his mouth twitched as the short human's eyes widened. "For several reasons," the Namek added. "You're small, so you'll fit easily on the carpet with Yamcha. You're a fast fighter, which will be an asset in low gravity. And in addition to that--you're probably the only other one of us who would be able to follow Ygarddro's directions if something happened to Yamcha." His antennae quivered slightly in vexation at the admission of weakness, but he knew himself well enough to know that it was true. Machines stumped him, and always had.

Kuririn took a deep breath, and accepted the capsule that Kaiobito handed him. He uncapsulized it; the spacesuit snugged down to fit his smaller body.

"Ready?" Yamcha said.

"Ready."

Yamcha unrolled the carpet and the two humans climbed on. "Pu'ar, wait a minute or so, and then become a radio and try to contact us," Yamcha told her.

"Right, Yamcha-sama!"

The humans slipped the helmets over their heads. "You know what," Yamcha said to Kuririn, privately over the suit radio. "I don't have the foggiest clue how to steer this thing."

"I think you're supposed to give it mental directions."

"Oh, really?" He concentrated.

"WAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" Both of them nearly tumbled off as the carpet zoomed out the door and zipped down the hall. Kuririn ended up lying in Yamcha's lap. Embarrassed, he scrambled off and got a better grip on the rug.

They rounded a turn and there, to their right, was a metal access panel. It wasn't screwed down and Yamcha slid it out of the way, revealing a dark shaft going down.

"Down?" Kuririn said. "Shouldn't it be going up? Do you think this is the right one?"

"Dunno." Yamcha stared into the depths. "Well, we don't really have time to go back and ask."

"True."

The shaft appeared small, but the carpet dropped into it with room to spare. As they plunged downwards, the humans experienced a weird, stomach-wrenching sensation, and then became aware that the shaft had become horizontal and they were now cruising forward rather than down, though they hadn't noticed a change of direction.

Kuririn started laughing.

"What is it?"

"We're idiots," the short human said, still giggling. "There's no up and down in space. The ship must have its own artificial gravity, and what it considers 'down' isn't necessarily down with regards to the Earth. We're probably feeling Earth's gravity now." Bulma had explained the mechanics of artificial gravity to him during the trip to Namek in excruciating detail. At the time, he'd been mostly trying to ignore her, but now he was glad that at least some of it had sunk in.

Yamcha didn't have time to reply, for they'd reached a dead end. The shaft stopped at a round door with a rotating crank-handle. The humans checked their suits and found that all the indicator lights were green--rather surprising considering the rough treatment that the suits had had to endure when they'd originally landed--and then each took one side of the crank handle. Slowly, with much resistance, it began to rotate.

"You know--umph!--my suit says that I only have about fifteen minutes of--oof!--air. How about yours?" Kuririn said as they struggled with the handle.

"Hmm? Where do you check?"

"Inside your helmet, second set of numbers from the left." Another thing he'd learned from Bulma.

"Yeah, about the same," Yamcha reported.

They were both silent momentarily, as they forced the handle and the door reluctantly began to slide back. Then Kuririn said, "I don't suppose it matters much. If we don't succeed, suffocation will be the least of our problems."

"I forgot what a ray of sunshine you can be," Yamcha said, as the door lurched back creakily into the side of the shaft, and then the two humans forgot to bicker as they were confronted by an unforgettable sight.

The door was not a true airlock, which would have had a second chamber and a second door between the environment inside the ship and the vacuum of outer space. Instead, it opened directly onto the surface of the ship.

It's like a junkyard, Kuririn thought--a junkyard for giants.

The ship's scarred, cratered surface stretched in front of them literally for miles before ending in a series of huge antenna arrays that rose like the towers of a distant city. The exterior of the ship was a mess, with pieces of its thick metal skin peeled back by collisions with asteroids or by ancient battles, some of the scars still straddled by scaffolding and looking as if they had been abandoned halfway through the rebuilding process. Everywhere the two humans looked were other signs of the vessel's great age--huge dark scars as if it had flown through the coronas of suns; boulder-sized meteors embedded in its hull; giant, arcane structures of every description bolted to the surface that might have once had a purpose but now just contributed to the impression of neglect and abandonment.

Beyond the towers of the distant antenna arrays, the Earth began. They were orbiting in the upper atmosphere, low enough to feel some amount of gravity but too high to have breathable air. Below them, a dark sea of clouds stretched out to a bright line at the gently curving horizon, where the sun would soon peek around the side of the planet. They could see the upper edge of the atmosphere itself, a blurry line of midnight blue shading slowly into the utter darkness of outer space, and there the stars began: too many stars for the human mind to comprehend, brighter than the stars on the clearest winter's night. Among them, the red lights of the spiders flickered in an incomprehensible, oddly beautiful aerial ballet.

"Wow," Yamcha whispered, absently snaring the flying carpet before it could drift away.

Kuririn was speechless. _Juuhachi, I wish I could show you this,_ he thought.

"Are you there?" a voice squeaked suddenly in his ear. He jumped.

"Pu'ar, it's you! It worked!" Yamcha exclaimed.

"Actually, this is Ygarddro," the voice squeaked over the suit radios. "Are you outside the ship?"

Yamcha and Kuririn looked at each other, trying not to laugh. "I guess it makes sense that a Pu'ar radio would sound like Pu'ar," Yamcha said over the suits' private channel. "Yes, we are," he told Ygarddro.

"Excellent. Do you see the satellite?"

They'd been so captivated by the view that they'd forgotten to look. Kuririn tilted his head back, scanning the sky.

"There!" Yamcha pointed to a small glimmer, a flash of blue light among the stars. It might have been just another star--but then it turned slightly, and they could make out its bulkier shape. "Yes, we see it," he told the alien. "We're on our way."

They had a moment of nervousness when the carpet sank sluggishly under their weight, but then it seemed to recover, perhaps adjusting itself for the new flying conditions, and they rose into the sky. Kuririn swallowed and tightened his grip on the carpet, realizing for the first time that they should have thought of some kind of tether. He did not relish the idea of falling into that far-too-distant cloud layer.

"I wonder how in the world Dende managed this without a suit?" Yamcha mused, perhaps trying to distract himself from the thought of falling, too.

"I overheard him tell Piccolo that he used his healing powers," Kuririn said, grateful for the distraction.

"Healed himself as he went, you mean?" Yamcha said in surprise. "I didn't know he could do that."

"Neither did I. Maybe he didn't, either. It was a very brave thing for him to do. I wonder how he's getting along."

"Probably better than we are. At least he doesn't know about the self-destruct," Yamcha pointed out.

"Ignorance is bliss, huh?"

"When your world is about to get blown up, it probably is." He fell silent, as they closed on the satellite. At length, he said, "The ones I really wonder about are Bulma and the others. We haven't heard anything from them since we were separated."

"Hey, this is Goku we're talking about here," Kuririn said, forcing cheer into his voice. "If Goku can't handle himself, then who can? It's a huge ship. Even if they're trying to find us, they could wander around forever without being able to sense our ki."

Yamcha chucked softly. "Yeah ... and if I know Goku, he's probably solving the whole problem for us, and we'll get to that satellite to find out that we're redundant ... as usual."

Kuririn glanced up at the slight note of bitterness in his friend's voice. "At this point," he said fervently, "I wouldn't mind."

 

* * *

 

The sound of Goten's neck breaking was loud as a gunshot in the suddenly quiet room.

001 released the boy's body and he fell into a little crumpled heap ... impossibly small ... impossibly fragile.

Trunks, struggling to pull himself back to his feet, made a tiny strangled sound. His eyes were two great blue pools in his bloodless face.

Vegeta stared at the child's body, not wanting to look at Bulma ... or Goku. _It could so easily have been Trunks ..._

But it wasn't as if he had no feelings at all for Goten, either. Though he would deny it to his last dying breath, the kid had grown on him over the last few years. After all, the brat spent so much time at Capsule Corp. that he might as well live there ... and Vegeta felt a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach, staring at the child's body.

003 was struggling, attempting to right itself, but the boys' attack appeared to have knocked out some vital part of its navigational system, and all it managed to do was flail around like a stunned bird. Abandoning Goten's body as if it was nothing more than rubbish, 001 leaned over to check on the other robot's operational status.

Goku watched it all, unmoving as a statue. The veins bulged on his arms and in his face; his eyes were wide, staring.

In a few minutes, he'd just lost everything. Everything. His wife. His sons. For the second time ... for the second time, they'd all died, and he'd been unable to protect them.

In that moment, something inside him snapped.

Goku screamed.

There was nothing human in that scream. Goku might have married a human; he might have lived among humans all his life; he might even consider himself one of them; but he wasn't. He wasn't. That scream was the scream of an animal, a predator--a primal shriek that tore from his throat and went on and on.

Vegeta staggered as a wave of energy rolled over him. _Ki? Impossible!_ he thought, stunned, even as the heat of it scorched his unprotected skin. He turned his head, squinting against the wind that whipped back his black hair. Distantly, he heard Bulma cry out, but his attention was entirely captivated by Kakarrot.

Golden light swirled around Goku in an ever-growing tower of flame. Blue lightning flashed down his arms and flickered over the spikes of his hair. His eyes were open impossibly wide, the pupils shrunken to tiny specks. His hair stood on end. If he'd still had a tail, it would have been stiff and bristling. Waves of ki battered at Vegeta, enough to flood even his dulled ki-sense painfully.

Goku's mouth was open but he wasn't screaming anymore--either that, or it had passed beyond the upper edge of hearing. His hair flashed gold, black, gold.

 _Where is he getting this ki from?_ Vegeta thought in astonishment.

And then he knew. Because he'd seen it done before, hadn't he? He'd done it before.

 _His life. He's burning up his life._

But he'd never seen anybody do it like that before. _In one burst, yes. I've done that. But little by little like this ... he's killing himself an inch at a time. I didn't know it could be done on a conscious level. It shouldn't be possible ..._

But wasn't that Kakarrot's way--to do the impossible?

Even if it killed him.

 

* * *

 

They reached the satellite without incident. None of the spiders were near enough to be visible as anything more than a distant glimmer of red light.

When they were close enough, both humans caught hold of the satellite and swung down from the carpet. Yamcha rolled up the carpet and stuck it through his sword belt, then opened the tool box.

The satellite was about the size of a capsule car. It had no place for the humans to stand, but it did have grapples all over it--probably designed either for maintenance robots to hold onto, or for some kind of automated system to catch hold of its round body to deploy and retrieve it, but either way, they functioned just as well as handles for human hands. Kuririn hooked his legs in such a way that he had his hands free, and held the toolbox for Yamcha.

"Okay, Ygarddro, we're here," Yamcha said into the suit radio.

"Do you see a panel cover--about the size of one of your outstretched arms?" the radio squeaked.

Kuririn suppressed a smile. It was still difficult to hear that high-pitched voice and imagine the bulky alien rather than Pu'ar's tiny flying shape.

"Yep, it's right in front of me."

Following Ygarddro's directions, Yamcha pried the cover up, revealing a snake-nest of tangled wires. Both humans stared in dismay, but the alien began to give directions, and Yamcha followed to the best of his ability, clipping wires and crossing and rewiring them.

"Wouldn't it be easier to just blow it up?" Kuririn asked, watching the mechanic work.

"It would serve no useful function," Ygarddro said in Pu'ar's voice. "If one of the satellites stops functioning, the others just continue with their programming. The ki-suppressing field is very stable except for a few seconds when it's starting up. You have to send a signal to directly shut them down, or you'd have to blow up at least half of them to get the same effect."

"How may are there?" Yamcha asked, the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on a stuck bolt.

"Two hundred and six at the last count, I believe."

"Oh."

"Hey, is this going to affect the ship's ki-damping field too?" Kuririn asked, an unpleasant thought occurring to him. "It can't be caused by the satellites, since you said it's there all the time."

"That's true, but the signal can go the other way, too," Ygarddro explained. "When the planet-sized ki field first establishes itself, the ship's field goes off for a few seconds--as I said before, the field has to be established all at once or it won't be stable. I'm having you two rewire the satellite so that it will send the initiation sequence, causing all the satellites to turn off, as well as the machinery on the ship. But the satellite will never send the signal to turn it back on, so it'll stay off."

"Ah," Kuririn said.

His attention began to drift, as it seemed that there wasn't much here for him to do other than hand Yamcha tools from the box (usually the wrong tools, it seemed to him, with nothing but Ygarddro's vague descriptions to go by). He tried to keep himself alert by looking out for spiders.

"Ha!" Yamcha said suddenly.

Kuririn looked around, startled. "Huh?"

"The pathetic, weak humans are back in the game," the human said triumphantly, as he carefully wound a red wire and a blue wire around each other. "You realize that, right?"

"What do you mean?"

Yamcha turned from the mess of wires he was sabotaging. "I mean ... we're saving the world here, Kuririn. Do you realize that? You and me. Not Goku. Not Gohan. Us. I don't know where Goku is or what he's doing, but obviously whatever he's doing isn't helping us out much, for a change."

"We don't know that," Kuririn said, but it sounded lame even in his own ears.

"Hmph. Kuririn, think about it. Do you realize how long it's been since we've been able to even approach their level? We work just as hard as those guys--maybe even harder, but we'll always be second best. It's not our fault they have Saiyajin blood. But right now, it's even, Kuririn. We're not behind those guys anymore. We can do anything they can do."

Kuririn gave his friend a quizzical look. "What ... are you suggesting that things should stay this way?"

Yamcha snorted. "No. I'm just sayin'--think about it. We're saving the world. Not getting blown up or stabbed or killed. Not sitting on the sidelines feeling worthless while our friends get beat to a pulp. We're the heroes this time around. When's the last time that happened?"

Kuririn's slow, shy grin answered Yamcha's more confident smile. "I guess, maybe you're right--so we'd better stop talking and get back to doing it!"

Yamcha high-fived him. "Yeah, that's the spirit!"

After a moment more of watching Yamcha work in silence, Kuririn said, "You know, maybe that's not the way to look at it, though."

When he paused, Yamcha prompted, "Go on."

"Well, what I mean is ..." Kuririn fumbled for the right words. He wasn't good at talking, not like Bulma or Eighteen--those self-confident people who were never shy about what they wanted to say. Or like Gohan, who, though shy and quiet himself, still was smart enough to organize his thoughts effortlessly. And this was an important thought, Kuririn felt--a thought he'd never had before, one that seemed to wrap around the ragged edges of his life and make it neat and tidy just as if it had been capsulized in one of the Briefs' capsules.

Yamcha pried a stuck anchor clip loose with his screwdriver and caught it in one gloved hand before it could fly off. "I'm listening," he said quietly.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is ... with power like that, you also get responsibility that's just as big. You're always going to have people watching you and second-guessing you, having people ask if maybe it would have all gone better if you'd done this instead of that. I mean, with you and me, up here today--we know that those damned robots got off one good shot with the laser, and millions of people must have died, including some that we know ..." His voice faltered, but came back stronger. "Not to mention all the homes and animals and plants that were destroyed. Even if we use the dragonballs to fix everything, even if we have Shenlong erase their memories like we did with Buu--and I hate doing that kind of thing, even when I know it's the right thing--then we'll still know. We'll know that all those people died because we were too slow."

"Kuririn ..."

Kuririn smacked his fist into the side of the satellite, almost flinging himself off into space in the unaccustomed light gravity. "I don't _want_ to be the guy who saves the world, Yamcha. I don't want to have all that responsibility and guilt come down on my shoulders. And you know, if you're as powerful as Goku and all of those guys, or even as powerful as us--then you can't ever put that responsibility down, and I hate it sometimes. Because when something powerful and dangerous comes along, you're the only one who can help. You can't just sit back and be scared like a normal person while somebody else takes care of it ... because there isn't anyone else. I think even Vegeta started to realize that, eventually. It doesn't matter what you want to do--if you want to be something other than a fighter, or if you want to have kids and a family. This responsibility means that you might have to leave your dreams unfulfilled, your wife a widow, your kids orphans.

"When all this is over, Yamcha, I just want to go back to Kame House and sit on the beach with Eighteen and watch Marron play in the sand. I wish I was there now. I want my mind to be filled with thoughts of my wife and daughter, not of ... of all the things I did wrong today, and all the people who died because I did the wrong thing ..." His hands clenched; he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to get control of himself.

A large hand settled on his back.

"Hey, look," Yamcha said. "I'm like you, basically--an ordinary guy, right? I know I'm not cut from hero-type material. Kami, I wish I was, and sometimes I really miss bein' a part of the team and going up against guys like Nappa and Cell, as much as it sucked at the time. I'm a helluva lot happier wandering around in the desert with Pu'ar than I ever was fighting aliens and cyborgs. But, you know ... I've always believed that whether you deserve it or not, everybody, sooner or later, gets their moment--and this is ours, dammit. No matter what happens, if we die, if we get blown up or if we succeed and the spiders kill us a few seconds later--we were _there,_ man. We were the ones in the right place at the right time, the place where Goku usually is. And we tried our hardest, and no matter what anybody says afterward, no matter how we second-guess ourselves, we'll still know that we did our best. Also, don't cry in a helmet. Bad idea."

Kuririn laughed a soft, slightly choked laugh. He raised a hand towards his face automatically, but it merely clicked against the glass faceplate. "You're right."

"Another first," Yamcha remarked cheerfully.

Ygarddro's voice--in Pu'ar's squeaky tones--cut into their ears. "Are you finished with the twelfth set of wires yet?"

"Just finishing up," Yamcha said, hastily sliding back over to the access panel. He clamped the wires carefully and let go. "Now what?"

"Now look up. There's a light on top of the satellite. Is it glowing?"

"A red light?"

"Yes."

"It's glowing," Yamcha said, and when there was no reply he snapped, "Well? Is that bad? Good? Did we save the world or are we all about to be blown up a few minutes ahead of time?"

"Hopefully, it's good," the alien said. "The red light means that it's transmitting. If everything was done correctly, it should be transmitting a shut-down code that will turn off the other satellites."

"So we wait," Yamcha said, settling down against the satellite's grapples.

"Yeah," Kuririn said. "I guess we wait."

 

* * *

 

Goku brought his arms forward, laced with blue lightning, and the restraints on his wrists shattered in a shower of sparks. Momentum carried him forward onto the floor.

"What are you doing?" 001 demanded, spinning around--literally; its wheeled base remained stationary, while its top half rotated 180 degrees.

Goku merely stared at him, his body sheathed in flames. He was fully into the Super Saiyajin mode now, and his pupilless blue irises were so wide that none of the whites of his eyes could be seen--it was as if his eyes were pools of blue-green fire.

"I demand that you stop what you're doing right now!" The machine's voice rose in a mechanical version of panic, as its shoulders rotated forward and huge lasers unfolded out of them. The tips of the lasers glowed with balls of white energy and two beams of light speared towards the Saiyajin.

Goku raised his hand and batted them away. He opened his mouth but he didn't speak--he merely snarled.

"I said, stop!" the machine keened, powering up the lasers again.

In eerie silence, saying nothing, Goku leaped. His speed wasn't quite the preternatural, beyond-the-human-senses speed of the normal Super Saiyajin, but it was still beyond anything 001 was equipped to stop. Both of Goku's fists punched through the machine's center--its chest, or the equivalent. Its voice turned to a high-pitched squeal of damaged vocal circuits. Still silent, Goku pounded its body, flattening it, his fists rising and falling as if he himself was a machine.

The smaller spiders in the room reacted automatically to the threat and charged en masse. Goku whirled on them, a wave of fire rippling outwards from his body, flinging their small metal forms into the walls where they disintegrated into showers of shrapnel. Bulma screamed again, trying to shield her face as flying bits of metal rattled against the wall around her. But Goku wasn't finished--he pointed at each of the charred corpses, and a bolt of energy lanced from his finger, searing holes through the spiders' bodies and through the walls. Out-of-control lightning sparked around his body, drawn to the metal of the room--random lightning strikes stabbed at the ceiling, at the walls. One grounded near Trunks, who cried out and scuttled closer to Goten, futilely trying to shield his friend's body from the energy.

"Damn it, Kakarrot! Control your ki!" Vegeta shouted, fighting against his own bonds in helpless frustration.

But Goku wasn't in control--Goku was clearly farther out of control than he'd ever been before. Light danced over his body, illuminating the room in ghastly shades of blue, turning the warm tints of human skin to the gray pallor of a corpse. It was the only light in the room, since most of the lights had been destroyed. The damaged walls and ceiling had begun to give way--pieces of the ceiling fell to the floor, landing around them in a lethal rain. One of the pieces skewered the hapless 003, which gave a final keening shriek before it died.

Goku flinched violently at the noise and spun on 003, a bolt of light lancing from his hand to fry what was left of the dead robot. Vegeta saw, in astonishment and horror, that the uncontrolled heat of his ki was so great that it had charred and melted his gi in a black circle over his heart.

 _If he keeps at it, he's either going to kill himself, burn completely out--or he's going to blow up and kill MY mate and son, too._ Vegeta strained against his bonds. _I don't have the strength to escape ... unless ..._

DAMN IT! If Kakarrot can do it, so can I!

He reached down inside himself, brutally clawing at his own life energy. He had surpassed all his body's other limits in the past--he'd become a Super Saiyajin, he'd learned to withstand pain right up to the point of death-agony. Now he reached the final barrier: not the mind's fear of dying, but the body's--its instinctive drive to protect itself. It was not that hard to die quickly, if one was prepared. Humans did it all the time, weak as they were--a mother throwing her body between her child and a speeding hovercar ... a soldier covering his comrade's body with his own ... the trick was to do it so quickly that the body's instinct for self-preservation could not kick in.

But dying a little at a time, as Kakarrot was doing, as he himself must do ...

Goku's hair flashed back and forth between gold and black, gold and black, as energy crackled wildly around his body. He didn't have enough energy to stay permanently in his Super Saiyajin form, but was continually falling out of it and pushing himself back in, through sheer force of will. When his hair turned black, it was streaked with gray.

Vegeta tore at his own life by the roots and gasped in shock and pain as golden light flared along his arm. He tore himself from the wall and his bonds disintegrated into a million fragments.

He stumbled, weak and sick and gasping just from that little burst of energy. More. He needed more. He fell to his knees, half-blinded by a blue-white flash as another wave of Goku's lifeforce wiped out most of the surviving spiders and nearly fried Bulma and Trunks as well.

"Kakarrot!" Vegeta yelled at the top of his lungs. "Stop it! Power down, you fool!"

The energy flaring around Goku had faded from white-gold, to golden, to orange, and now had begun to take on a reddish hue. Lightning burst from him in wild explosions, striking the walls and sending sparks cascading around Bulma, who cried out and tried to twist her head away to shield her face. Sparks shot up and down Goku's hair--mostly gray now, more gray than black or blond.

Vegeta leaped.

It was incredibly dangerous to touch a transforming Saiyajin--and beyond insanity to do it without the protection of ki. The stray energies that tore up the surrounding scenery could easily do the same to a human or Saiyajin body. Vegeta hit Goku from behind, bearing him to the floor. He screamed in pain as the flesh of his arms and chest was seared agonizingly by the crackling energy, but he managed to hold on.

"Kakarrot!"

Vegeta drew on his own life-ki, battering down his body's very urge to live, overcoming the most basic drive of the living flesh with the sheer force of his willpower. He had to do it, or else he would be incinerated on the spot. He screamed, gold light flashing around his body. He could not summon the energy to turn Super Saiyajin, but he could at least keep from being charred to ash as Goku's ki flared, impossibly, ever higher.

"I am your prince and I order you to desist!"

There was no response from Goku except another wave of energy. Vegeta struggled to hold him down.

"Kakarrot!" he yelled into Goku's ear, shaking him violently, battering his head against the floor in desperation to knock some sense into that thick skull. "Kakarrot, think! You've lost nothing you can't regain! The dragonballs can bring Goten back! Listen to me, you moron!" In his own mind, he heard the distant echo of Kuririn's voice during the Cell Games: _Vegeta, you fool, we can bring Trunks back with the dragonballs!_ Oh yes, he understood ... he understood too well.

"Kakarrot! You've avenged your son--look!" He gripped a handful of Goku's hair, smoke curling from around his fingers as the fabric of his gloves blackened and crisped, and yanked the other Saiyajin's head up, forced him to look at the flaming wreckage of 001. "What are you trying to prove now? Idiot! Baka! _Do you hear me, Kakarrot?"_

But he didn't hear, he wasn't listening. The ki-fires of Goku's rage flared up around Vegeta. It was all he could do to keep from being burned alive. _This isn't like Kakarrot--what's wrong with him?_

But he realized the truth then. He saw it in those blazing aqua eyes--he wasn't really dealing with Goku anymore. Goku was too far gone to even understand what was happening. It was like the Oozaru transformation, a complete descent into savagery, and yet beyond even that, for even in the Oozaru state, some degree of self-preservation remained. Goku was lost to anything but rage, in an irreversible downhill slide to self-immolation. It wasn't that he was trying to kill himself or others--just that he didn't know how to do anything else.

"Kakar--"

No. Not Kakarrot. Kakarrot was a Saiyajin name--and though he had struggled in the past to remind Kakarrot of his Saiyajin pride, it wasn't the Saiyajin that he needed to reach now. It was the human in the Saiyajin.

"Goku," Vegeta said.

He wasn't screaming anymore; he couldn't. Between screaming at the top of his lungs, and inhaling the superheated air around him, he'd blistered his throat and rendered himself nearly mute. Vegeta held Goku pinned to the floor with his body weight--and just the fact that he could do that, when Super Saiyajin Goku should have been able to throw him off like a rag doll, indicated how close Goku was to the end of his strength, the end of his life. Vegeta leaned forward and spoke into Goku's ear, as loud as he could speak now, which was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. Goku could not possibly be able to hear him over the roar and crackle of the energy surrounding them. Yet still Vegeta spoke, tearing each word painfully from his burned throat, as if he could somehow be heard and understood.

"Goku. Stop this. You can do it; it's still in you to regain control. Do you hear me? Goku? For Chi-Chi ... and Gohan ... and yes, for Goten too ... Stop it ... now ..." And the final word, the word he'd never spoken to Goku before, the word he'd sworn he would never use to that man, never, no matter what ... "Please."

Nothing happened--and then, suddenly, like a switch turning off, the ki-fire flickered out.

Sudden silence. Sudden darkness. Most of the lights in the room had been destroyed, and they were left in a dim twilight, lit mainly by the fires burning here and there in the wreckage of the room. Someone coughed in the smoke. Somewhere, something fell from one of the shifting piles of debris, crashing into the rubble with a clatter that was shockingly loud in the stillness.

Vegeta rose cautiously to his knees. His body ached to the core and his arms hurt with a blinding pain. He'd managed to protect himself, for the most part, from having his flesh stripped away by Goku's fires, but he was afraid to look down and see how bad the damage actually was. He was exhausted--as depleted as he'd been when the Gogeta fusion broke. Only massive effort, and the iron will of his pride, kept him upright.

Gentle wisps of smoke drifted up from Goku's hair--which was salt-and-pepper now, rather than black. Vegeta felt the other Saiyajin's neck with his sore fingertips, finding the light flutter of a pulse in Goku's carotid artery. He did not know how much damage had been done by the ki-fire. It was possible that Goku's internal organs were charred to ash, and if so, he would be dead in moments. Vegeta was too emotionally depleted to care. He staggered to his feet, swaying.

"Vegeta!" a familiar voice cried through the smoke. Vegeta stumbled toward the source. Bulma still dangled from her bonds, her face covered with dust and streaked with tears. She looked beautiful to him. Vegeta tugged at her shackles and, somewhere within himself, found the strength to crack them away from her slender wrists--she had not been secured as firmly as the two Saiyajins. She stumbled and caught herself on the wall.

"Are you all right?" she asked him. Vegeta nodded. He had no strength to do more.

"And Trunks?"

"I don't know," Vegeta rasped. Bulma looked around, in time to see her son's dusty pink head emerge from a pile of rubble. Trunks fumbled with the pieces of metal trapping him, moving as if he was in a dream-state. After watching his mother tortured, his best friend killed, and his father and the man who was almost a second father to him nearly being incinerated, Trunks appeared to be on the verge of a severe case of shell shock.

Bulma clambered over the rubble to help her son. Vegeta saw her pause and gasp as she started to help Trunks extricate himself. Coming a bit closer, the prince realized that his son had gotten buried because he was shielding Goten's body from the falling wreckage.

Bulma hugged Trunks, who didn't respond; his small body was rigid and shaking. Then she reached for Goten, and Trunks came suddenly to life, putting his arm over the younger boy's corpse.

"No, don't touch him," he said in a voice that shook so hard the adults could barely understand his words. Tears welled in his blue eyes, cut paths through the dust and filth on his cheeks.

"Trunks, honey, it's Mama," Bulma said, reaching out her grimy hands to move her son gently aside. "Let me pick up Goten. I'll carry him."

Kneeling, Bulma tucked her arms under Goten's body and picked him up with excruciating care. Trunks just stared, wide-eyed and unblinking.

"I was supposed to take care of Goten," he said in a choked voice. "He's younger. He's just a kid. I'm the big one. I was supposed to take care of him."

Bulma looked helplessly at Vegeta. Her hands were full, so she couldn't comfort her son. Vegeta found himself moving forward until he could put a burned hand on Trunks's shoulder. The boy's muscles were tensed up as solid as stone. Vegeta shook him gently.

"Help your mother," he said in a hoarse whisper. "The dragonballs will bring back Goten. This is no time for grief. It is time for you to be a man now."

"Vegeta, how is Son-kun?" Bulma asked, as Trunks turned back to her, still moving slowly, like a sleepwalker.

"Alive," Vegeta replied. He felt disoriented and disconnected, as if a hazy curtain was drifting between himself and reality. He shook his head, trying to snap himself back to reality. He was exhausted and possibly in shock from his burns, and they were hardly out of danger yet. Somehow they still had to get off this ship, a ship full of spiders ... and, being unable to fly, they had no way to get back to the ground.

Self-destruct ... hadn't 001 said something about the ship self-destructing? Only a few minutes ago ... but it seemed years, now. He couldn't remember.

The family picked their way across the rubble, back to Goku, who lay unmoving in the center of a ring of metal burned to black. Vegeta crouched down beside his enemy, his rival ... his friend. He shook Goku's shoulder, causing pieces of the charred gi to flake off in his hand. "Kakarrot. Wake up," he snapped, and then remembering that it had worked before, "Goku. Son Gok --"

He froze as a strange feeling stole across him. Something had just changed. What was it?

 _He could feel Bulma and Trunks's ki._

Vegeta raised his hand and formed a small ball of ki in the palm. He was still completely worn out, and doubted if he could even raise the energy to fly at the moment, but whatever was blocking their ki was gone.

"What is it?" Bulma asked him.

"We can use ki again."

There were no words to describe what a miracle it felt to him at the moment. It was like having a veil fall away from his eyes, like having crutches fall from his legs. He had all his senses back, all his faculties back. He felt Goku's faltering ki beside him, and then reached out across the ship. Yes, they were all there, Kaiobito and Kuririn and Piccolo (separated from the fusion, apparently) and Yamcha and--Dende? What the hell? And several other weak ki-sources that he could not identify.

Vegeta's hand on Goku's shoulder tightened in suppressed excitement. "Kakarrot. Goku. Time to wake up now. We need you to teleport us. We're all getting out of here."

Goku stirred. "Veh ..." He twisted his head, and Vegeta caught a glimpse of his face--hardly recognizable anymore, ravaged by grief and by the damage he'd done to his body. "Did you just call me Goku ...?" Still a master of stating the obvious, it seemed.

Vegeta waved a hand impatiently. "There's no time to screw around," he rasped. "Our ki's come back. Are you able to teleport?"

Goku tried to push himself up on his arms, then fell back weakly. "Don't know," he murmured. "Where should I go?"

"Piccolo," Vegeta decided. Wherever Piccolo was, the Namek probably had a better idea than anyone of what was going on elsewhere on the ship.

"Hold onto me," Goku whispered, and Vegeta tightened his grip on Goku's shoulder and reached out to put one hand on Trunks's small body, while the boy put an arm around Bulma's leg.

There were no spectacular fireworks, just a flicker, and the small group blinked out, leaving the room empty as the flames flickered dully and smoke curled around the wreckage of a robot that had masterminded the destruction of a thousand worlds.

 

* * *

 

In the other control room, Piccolo and Kaiobito looked up at the ceiling as if they could somehow help the humans deactivate the satellites (looking in entirely the wrong direction anyhow, but they didn't know that). Pu'ar had just reverted into her normal form for the second time in the conversation, panting. Holding herself in radio shape was taking every last ounce of energy that she possessed.

Suddenly Piccolo felt a strange rushing sensation throughout his body, starting in the core of his being and tingling out to his extremities and down to his toes and the tips of his antennae. It was a bit like the fusions that he'd experiences with Nail and Kami-sama, but less extreme, less invasive. He must have gasped, for Kaiobito looked quickly at him and then the blue god's eyes widened as he felt his own equivalent of the same thing.

"Our ki," Piccolo gasped, and then roared aloud, _"Our ki!!!"_

He raised his hand above his head and a ball of light arose in his palm, flaring up towards the ceiling and then falling back into his green skin. The Namek started laughing uncontrollably.

"It worked?" Ygarddro asked them. "I feel ... I feel better than I have in years!"

"It worked," Piccolo agreed, unable to keep the fanged grin off his face. "Pu'ar! Change back into that radio and we'll tell K --"

"No, don't bother. I should be able to use Instantaneous Transmission now," Kaiobito told him, grinning just as broadly. "I'll get them! Hold on!"

He vanished, reappearing seconds later gripping a stunned Yamcha and Kuririn by one wrist apiece. The two humans stood for a moment, staring; then they took off their helmets and started laughing too.

"We did it!" Yamcha yelled, punching the air. _"We did it!"_

"Um ... guys, the countdown is still counting down," Kuririn said, pointing up at the screen.

Yamcha snorted, dismissing it. "We can easily deal with that now. We've got our ki back! All we have to do is what we normally do--blow up the ship or somethin'."

"The ship is _going_ to to blow up! That's the _problem!"_

The euphoric mood evaporated and the group stood staring at each other, realizing that their original problem hadn't been eliminated by the re-introduction of their ki powers.

"Hey!" Kuririn said suddenly. "Now that we can sense ki, can anybody feel Gok --"

 _Foomph!_ With a rush of displaced air, the small tableau of Goku, Vegeta and family teleported into the middle of the floor.

"--ku," Kuririn finished. _"Goku!"_

Hearing his name, Goku raised his head--or tried to; he looked half-dead, battered and burned from head to foot. The rest of the group didn't look much better.

"Guys!" Bulma cried, her exhaustion-slumped shoulders straightening as she saw them. "You're all okay!" Then she saw Ygarddro and her mouth opened at the sight of the alien. "Uh--what's --"

Vegeta interrupted her, his hoarse, rasping voice cutting harshly across her question. "Where's Dende? I felt his ki; is he with you? We need a healer."

"Not with us; he --" Kuririn broke off, seeing Goten. He'd started to rush forward to reunite with his friends, but he stumbled to a stop in front of Bulma, hands dangling at his sides helplessly. "Is he ... uh, is he ..."

Bulma gave her head a brief shake and glanced down at Trunks, who was clinging to her leg, looking as if it was the only thing holding him up. Kuririn's eyes softened with sympathy. His gaze went from Trunks to Goku, lying on the floor next to him, and widened in shock when he saw, up close, the extent of the damage. Goku's gi was almost entirely burned away, and parts of his body were horribly seared.

"I can heal--" Kaiobito began. Piccolo gripped his arm, hard, and turned to glare at him.

"Not now!" he snapped. "This ship is going to explode in ... if my time-sense is accurate, and it usually is, about a minute. You have to teleport Ygarddro to the other control room so he can shut down the self-destruct from there."

Kaiobito nodded and went to Ygarddro, taking him by the arm. Ygarddro spoke, giving him directions apparently, and the two of them vanished.

"Dammit, what's going on here!" Vegeta snarled hoarsely, steadying himself on the nearest piece of machinery. He refused to reveal how close he was to collapsing. It looked as if the other group had been fighting as well; the place resembled a war zone.

"I'll make a long story short," Kuririn said, looking up at him from his crouched position next to Goku. "We ran into some trouble and this ship is going to self-destruct. Yeah, that sums it up pretty well ..."

"It shouldn't be a problem soon," Piccolo growled. "Kaiobito and Ygarddro just went to --"

He broke off as the god and the alien popped back into the middle of the room. Both looked shaken. "The other control room is worse than this one," Kaiobito said. "It looks like there was fighting there, too--it's almost completely destroyed."

"There's nothing I can do from there," Ygarddro added.

Piccolo bared his fangs. "You mean you can't shut this off?"

"No," Ygarddro said quietly.

"We have less than a minute now," Kuririn said softly, and added, looking up at Vegeta and Bulma in the realization that they didn't know: "When the ship explodes, it'll take the Earth with it."

Bulma swallowed, tightening her grip on Goten. Vegeta leaned against the piece of debris that he'd found for a prop, unable to take this in. "Dragonballs ..." he said.

"Dende will be killed too," Piccolo said.

"But ..." another voice rasped. Kuririn looked down at Goku in surprise. Goku looked so bad that it was hard to believe he was still conscious--hard to believe he was alive, actually. The Saiyajin managed to prop himself up on one arm, and gave the rest of them a shaky, lopsided grin. "Then ... we'll use Instantaneous Transmission ... go to Kaio-shin-kai or somewhere else safe."

"He's right!" Kaiobito gasped. "We can teleport to anywhere in --" His eyes widened and something in his face changed, hardened. "Grab hold of me or each other! Now!" he shouted at them.

They obeyed--Kaiobito didn't give orders often, but when he did, people listened to him, even this group. He'd centered on Dende's ki and the entire bunch of them materialized in the middle of the scientists' prison.

Dende jumped when he saw them appear out of the corner of his eye, and spun around, a smile breaking across his face. "You did it! My ki is back, and yours must be too!"

"No time for that," Kaiobito said, and turned to Goku. "Are you capable of teleporting with a group of people? I don't have time to heal you, I'm sorry."

"Don't worry. I can do it," Goku rasped.

He didn't look capable of it; he was being half-supported by Kuririn, since he didn't even have the strength to keep himself upright. But Kaiobito nodded--if Goku said he could do it, then he could do it.

"Then take them to Earth ... no, farther away than that," Kaiobito told him, and looked around the room, at the unresponsive scientists. They looked a little better than they had before; Dende had managed some limited healing. However, they continued to sit and stare at the floor or walls of their prison.

 _COME HERE!_ The command might have been shouted out loud--no one was certain, for Kaiobito's voice had roared it inside their minds. Injured, old and catatonic as they all were, the scientists flinched as one being. Slowly, their heads rotated to stare at the god.

 _COME HERE! DON'T MAKE ME SAY IT AGAIN!_

One by one, they began to lurch to their feet and shuffle over to the group of Z-senshi. Kaiobito turned back to the others. "Goku-san, take them as far away from here as you can teleport in your current condition. Kaio-shin-kai, if possible. If this doesn't work, you won't want to be on Earth."

"What are you planning?" Piccolo demanded.

Kaiobito smiled grimly. "I'm going to take the ship as far away from here as possible. I don't know if I can do it--I've never tried to transport anything this huge before. But we only have a few seconds--so go, Goku-san, go now!"

Goku's eyes closed as he concentrated, trying to marshall his scattered thoughts and focus on someone's ki, anyone's ki who wasn't here. Someone far away. He couldn't feel anyone ... he could barely feel any ki beyond the group of his friends around him. It was terribly difficult to muster the concentration. He kept fuzzing out, slipping half into unconsciousness. And then he realized that it was hopeless, he'd never be able to find one in time; he was too tired, too sick, too weak.

"Goku-san, why are you still here?" he heard Kaiobito scream, sounding distant and echoing emptily in his ears. _"Get out of here!"_

He was slipping. Passing out. Dying? There was only one chance, only one crazy thing he could think of. He thought of a person. Two people. Three. He could find their ki's anywhere ... anywhere in the galaxy. He was too dizzy and scattered to realize that what he was trying to do was impossible. He only knew that he had to do it.

So he did.

The group vanished. Kaiobito was left standing alone in the prison room. "Finally," he sighed, and wondered how much time he had--seconds, no more. He closed his eyes and concentrated as hard as he could. He had to take the ship somewhere utterly uninhabited, but at least big, empty, uninhabited places were one thing the universe had in abundance. He got a mental fix on a good place, somewhere between this solar system and the next, and gave every ounce of his energy over to the task of moving an impossibly large object.

As he lost himself in the strain, the thought crossed his mind: _This is very irresponsible. I didn't want to tell the others this, but I probably won't have the energy to teleport back out. My ancestor is going to hunt me down in the afterlife and re-kill me ..._

 

* * *

 

She'd finally got it! Eighteen gasped in triumph as she managed to unlock her internal power supply and soared into the air. But even as she opened her mouth to speak, she froze in the grip of a much greater shock.

Whatever had been blocking her ki ... had just vanished.

She looked down to see if the others felt it too, and saw that they had. Tenshinhan was looking around wildly, and then he raised his hand and formed a ball of ki in his palm. Lunch looked confused; she wasn't a ki fighter, so she probably hadn't noticed anything different.

Eighteen touched down lightly, flying with much more confidence. It wasn't a total loss. She seemed to be able to tap into both power sources now--her cyborg half and her human half. She would have to experiment and find out how much more power this actually gave her.

"They did it!" Tenshinhan yelled, staring up into the sky. "They're alive!"

Seventeen chuckled softly. "Well ... I'm simply not surprised."

In Tenshinhan's lap, Chaotzu stirred. Apparently the slight ki-surge had been enough to bring him around. "Ten ..." he mumbled weakly.

Tenshinhan bent over his small friend, grinning in relief, and laid his hand against Chaotzu's temple. "Nice to have you back."

Chaotzu smiled and closed his eyes again, but his breathing was steadier.

"We still have the spiders to deal with, don't forget," Eighteen said.

Tenshinhan laughed softly. "With ki, it'll be easy.We've suffered losses, but I think we've finally won." He looked up at Eighteen--and then his eyes went past her, into the sky.

"What is it?" Eighteen said. She looked behind her. And stared. The huge dark mass of the ship was shimmering--ripples traveled back and forth across its surface. And then, before her eyes, it vanished.

 

 

* * *

 

Vegeta closed his eyes on the ship, a wave of exhaustion overcoming him, steadied by the pressure of Bulma's hand on his arm. When he opened his eyes again, it was to blinding golden brilliance, shocking after the dim lights of the ship. It had worked. Kakarrot had teleported them somewhere. But where?

"Oh no ... not you too," he heard a voice say. A familiar voice.

 _Wait ... I thought he was ..._ Vegeta looked around, into the startled face of a very puzzled-looking Son Gohan.

Then he knew where he was. And he should have known earlier; he'd been here twice, and he'd have to be a total moron not to recognize those golden clouds, not to mention that distinctive pagoda in front of him. Normally he was much quicker on the uptake, but he was exhausted and pretty badly shaken up; it annoyed him that he hadn't figured it out sooner.

Somehow, Kakarrot had teleported them into the afterlife.

"Hey ... wait ... huh ... what ..." Kuririn looked back and forth in shock. A long, _long_ line of dead souls wound away from them and finally vanished into the clouds. The attention of every soul was fixed firmly on the ragged group of Z-senshi who had materialized in the midst of them.

The nearest were Gohan, Chi-Chi, Videl--and Goten, sitting perched on Gohan's shoulder.

"Hey, if you guys are dead, where are your halos?" Gohan asked, looking above their heads.

"We're not dead, fool," Vegeta rasped. Although he felt fairly close to it.

"What do you mean, you're not --" Then Gohan finally noticed his father, lying slumped beside Bulma's feet. "Dad ... omigosh ..."

Goten hopped down and ran to his father. "Daddy!"

"What is going on here!" Chi-Chi wailed.

"That's what I'd like to know!" Bulma snapped.

Piccolo chuckled. "Of course he brought us here. He must have fixated on you," he told Gohan and Chi-Chi. "If nobody tells Son Goku something is impossible, he just does it, doesn't he? He's used Instantaneous Transmission to get himself to the afterlife before."

"I suppose he has, at that," Vegeta murmured. And so he had. During the Cell Games. To Kaio-sama's planet. The rest of them had been too distracted to notice, at the time, that Goku had managed to teleport himself somewhere that wasn't even in the conventional universe. But then, that was Goku for you ...

"Idiot," Vegeta growled, looking over at the burned and unconscious Goku, who had been transferred from Kuririn's lap to Chi-Chi's softer one, with his family hovering around him. He could barely feel Goku's ki at all. Heck ... he could barely feel his own ki. What happened if you died in the afterlife? Did you even notice? He felt himself teetering again, and this time there was nothing to hold onto, so he managed to turn his fall into a controlled collapse into a sitting position. It almost looked intentional.

Bulma sat down beside him. Trunks had run over to Goten, upon seeing his friend alive again (well, sorta), but she was still holding Goten's body, which was decidedly ... creepy. She gently laid it down on the fluffy gold cloud-surface under them, and looked at her husband. She opened her mouth to speak--and, just then, Kaiobito appeared in front of them.

They looked up at him, as did the rest of the Z-senshi (aside from the unconscious Goku). Kaiobito was wearing a halo.

"That could have gone better," he said with a nervous laugh.

"The Earth --" Kuririn began.

"Is fine," Kaiobito reassured them. "No, I got the ship a good distance away. It's been completely destroyed, I imagine." He frowned. "Along with myself. I didn't have the energy left to teleport away. At least it was fairly quick."

"Dende!" Vegeta barked. Or tried to. His throat still felt as if he'd been swallowing glass.

"Yes, Vegeta-san?" the small Namek asked.

"Heal Go-- Kakarrot before he goes ahead and dies," Vegeta snapped, "and we're all stuck here. He's the only one left who can get us home."

"Oh--of course!" Dende knelt down beside Goku and laid his hands over the unconscious Saiyajin's spiky, partly gray hair.

Vegeta found himself slumping again. Luckily he came to rest against Bulma's shoulder. She poked him lightly. "Caught you. Almost called him Goku again," she said, smiling.

"Shut up, woman," Vegeta rasped with his eyes shut.

"You look like the next candidate for Dende's healing powers yourself."

"Hmph," he managed.

He wasn't terribly aware of the next few minutes--he was not precisely unconscious, but he drifted through it in a haze of exhaustion. The next thing he knew was a warm glow spreading through his body, washing away the fatigue and pain. He knew what it was, and opened his eyes to see Dende standing over him with glowing fingers outspread.

The little Namek wiped the back of his hand across his forehead when he was done. "I don't know if I've ever healed so many people at once."

Next to them, Kaiobito was healing Bulma's minor cuts and bruises. "Ahhh ..." she sighed, stretching.

Goku practically bounced over to them. He appeared to be fully healed--his hair was even black again. His gi had not been so fortunate; little pieces of it flaked off whenever he moved, and there was barely enough left to cover him. His energy (and cheerfulness) seemed to be back to normal--but Vegeta wondered if he was the only one who noticed a shadow in Goku's wide eyes. Even as resilient as he was, it would probably take him some time to recover from the events of this night.

"We can't use the Earth dragonballs yet--they haven't recharged from when we erased everybody's memories about Buu--but Piccolo reminded me that the Namek ones don't need an Earth year to regenerate," Goku explained breathlessly. "So I'm going to take you all back to Earth, and then I'll go to New Namek and have the elders help me get their dragonballs together." He waved his arms, getting the other's attention. "Hey, everybody! Hang onto me. We're going back to Earth!"

"See you soon, Dad," Gohan said, as the living members of the group gathered around Goku again.

Goku reached down to ruffle Goten's hair, and touched his fingertips to his forehead. "You'll see me again in a few minutes."

"Okay!" Goten chirped. He didn't seem to have even noticed that he'd died.

The golden clouds and radiant light disappeared--replaced by charred black earth, and the overwhelming smell of smoke. It was like going from heaven straight into hell.

Eighteen, Seventeen, Tenshinhan and Lunch spun around to face the new arrivals. For Eighteen, everyone else may as well not have existed; she saw only one face. "Kuririn," she breathed.

"Daddy!" Marron squealed, worming out of her mother's arms to scamper over and hop up into her father's waiting grasp.

After a brief flurry of hellos (and a few disbelieving glances at Seventeen, who stood aloof from the rest of them, glaring at them with his hands on his hips) the Z-senshi looked around them, stunned briefly into silence. It was one thing to see the laser blast from outer space--clean, cauterizing, like a surgeon's tool. It was quite another thing to stand on the barren scorched earth, hazed with smoke, like the world after an apocalypse.

The only good thing about the laser death-ray was that it had eliminated the danger of fire, in this region at least. There was nothing to burn. The smoke was even starting to thin out from the air, though the smell of soot still hung heavily on the senses like the smell of death itself.

"Do you want me to take you all someplace else?" Goku asked, his cheerful voice hushed.

Tenshinhan was the first to respond, shaking his head. "No. I'd rather stay here."

"Me, too," Bulma spoke up quietly. Her parents had died in this spot.

The others nodded. Goku smiled at them, saying nothing, and touched his fingers to his forehead. He vanished.

They waited.

Nothing happened.

"It'll probably be a little while," Vegeta broke in impatiently. "Even with that Instantaneous Transmission of his and the cooperation of the Nameks, it'll take Kakarrot some time to collect all the dragonballs."

"He's right," Kuririn sighed. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a pack of cards. "Well ... I do have these. Anybody up for a game?"

"Me!" Bulma exclaimed, eager for a distraction.

Most of the humans were interested; most of the others weren't. Bulma, Kuririn, Yamcha, Oolong and Chaotzu (who'd been healed by Dende) ended up in a circle, playing some kind of silly Earth game that involved laying down cards--Vegeta didn't have a clue what the rules were, and didn't care.

Eighteen sat beside Kuririn, with Marron sleeping in her lap. Pu'ar hovered in her usual spot beside Yamcha's shoulder. Trunks lay with his head resting in his mother's lap, possibly sleeping, possibly just wanting comfort--a very un-warriorly thing to do, but at the moment, Vegeta didn't have the energy to rebuke the boy. Next to Chaotzu, Tenshinhan watched the game in silence, crosslegged, with Lunch's head resting on his shoulder.

It was a very quiet game, devoid of the usual banter that normally accompanied a gathering of this particular group of people. Vegeta got the impression that they were huddling together, for comfort or protection, whether they realized it or not. _And why not,_ he thought. _It's been a long, difficult night for everyone. All they've known has been destroyed._

Speaking of which ... he looked around for the alien scientists. They, too, were huddled together, in a little knot nearby. Some of them had lapsed back into their catatonia and were merely sitting on the charred soil, while others looked around with the dazed expressions of wakened sleepwalkers. Dende and Ygarddro appeared to be trying to explain the situation to them, without much success.

Vegeta wondered what was to be done with them now. Most of them were old, and the last survivors of their kind. Resettle them on Earth, maybe? He grimaced--if he knew that woman of his, they'd probably end up living at Capsule Corp. for the foreseeable future, while she picked their brains about every bit of technology they'd ever seen, as she'd done with him when she first invited him to live there. Maybe he could talk her into moving them to a peaceful South Sea island or something--for their own good, since they had been so isolated for so long; he could probably work a good argument up. In the meantime, they'd hardly be noticed among the planet's eclectic mix of aliens, cyborgs, humans and even the occasional blob monster ... and speaking of which, for the first time he wondered, without too much curiosity, where Satan and Buu had gotten off to. At least, thankfully, they'd stayed out from underfoot this time.

He raised his eyes back to the sky and settled in to wait. Scattered spiders came nosing around from time to time, as the night wore on; Piccolo and Vegeta dealt with them, leaving the humans to play their game. The spiders were, as Vegeta had suspected, no challenge whatsoever with ki. On top of that, they seemed lost and aimless, their purpose for existence gone.

Overhead, the sky lightened slowly, changing from black to a deep rich blue, graduating into a pinkish tinge near the horizon. Despite himself, Vegeta found the colors intriguing, captivating in their variety. Had he ever really looked around him, at the world that was now his home? The amount of time he'd spent on Earth (nearly eight consecutive years, plus several intermittent years prior) was by far the longest he'd ever stayed in one place. Even as a child, he'd rarely spent that much time on Vegeta-sei, since his elite status required him to travel to other worlds. And after that planet's destruction, the vast majority of the time when he wasn't fighting was spent on spaceships, going to or coming from somewhere. He knew _of_ sunrises; he understood the physical phenomenon just fine. But he couldn't ever remember a time that he had paid attention to one.

Maybe that time had come.

He watched the clouds (or perhaps columns of smoke from the fires) turning to crisp gold near the horizon, lined with fire along their bottom edges. The pink flush slowly crept up the sky, blotting out the stars. In his peripheral vision, he noticed how the increasing light began to gradually increase the color saturation of the people around him. Bulma's hair brightened from gray to blue; Seventeen's scarf changed from a murky near-black to vivid orange.

And, in the ever-lightening world around him, something was happening. Below the horizon that he was watching so intently, he could now discern movement--not purposeful movement, such as an animal might make, but a whirling omnidirectional motion akin to the swirling of water around the base of a waterfall. Vegeta tensed, but then relaxed, as he recognized it for what it was. He'd just never seen it up close before.

That swirling was the movement of change. As it swept toward the group, the soft voices of the card players died out. Vegeta glanced around and saw that everyone--even Seventeen and most of the alien scientists--were looking towards the horizon ... towards the miracle approaching them.

Eddying behind the swirling motion, in the light of a new dawn, a ripple of greenery spread down from the distant hills. Trees arose in the blink of an eye--hills reforested even as they watched. The carpet of forest rushed over the residual fires, blotting out the flames as if they had never been. The change became even more dramatic as the dragonballs' magic reached the outer edge of the city. Buildings arose, rebuilding themselves in the blink of an eye. Streets spread out like water flowing around the feet of the buildings.

Behind the group lay charred devastation; before them, in the direction of the rising sun, was an untouched world, the world that had existed when the previous morning dawned, before the battles and sorrows of the previous night. And then the change was upon them, and even Vegeta found that he was bracing himself--for what, he did not know. But he felt nothing except a slight rush of wind on his face. And then he found himself standing hip-deep in an ornamental rosebush that had rebuilt itself around his legs. Bulma and the other card players were sitting on a patch of lawn grass, and there was a sudden startled splashing as the scientists and Dende found themselves knee-deep in the Briefs' carp pond.

They were in the gardens of Capsule Corp.

Before they had time to react, animals began to come to life around them--cats rose from the grass, stretching their lithe bodies; a baby pterodactyl unfolded its wings from one of the trees; butterflies unfurled from the hedges like bright-colored flower buds opening into flowers.

Bulma half-rose from the grass. "Mother?" she called. "Father?"

The front doors to Capsule Corp. opened, and the couple stepped out onto the lawn, looking around them in amazement and blinking in the light of the newly risen sun. Bulma scrambled to her feet with a choked sound (dumping Trunks into the grass in the process) and ran to throw her arms around her parents.

The sounds of the city were back, Vegeta realized--the whine of hoverjets, the sound of voices, laughter and shouts outside the walls of Capsule Corp. He wondered how much the people of Earth remembered. Did they know they had died? Or did they believe it was still the previous morning, and the past day had been only a dream?

Kaiobito appeared nearby, minus his halo and looking, as usual, a bit confused. He immediately had to leap out of the way of a capsule plane that set down on the lawn in a gust of wind that scattered the abandoned playing cards into the shrubbery. Reminded of his own predicament, Vegeta extricated himself from the rosebush with as much dignity as he could muster, while the door of the plane was flung open and Gohan hopped out with Videl's hand held tightly in his.

On the grass, nearly forgotten by the adults, Goten's small body stretched sleepily, and he opened his eyes and sat up. Confused, he rubbed his eyes and looked around, settling on the nearest familiar person, who happened to be Vegeta (still trying to get rose thorns out of what was left of his spandex). "Uncle!" the boy cried happily, running over to him and flinging his arms around Vegeta's leg.

"Ouch," Vegeta muttered, peeved, as several rogue thorns were driven into his thigh.

Goten tipped back his spiky head and looked up at the adult Saiyajin. "Where's Mom and Dad, Uncle Vegeta?"

"Your mother's over there," Vegeta growled, pointing at Chi-Chi, who was climbing down from the plane with Gohan's assistance, a dazed look on her face. "As for Kakarrot, he should be back any ... minute," he finished, as Goku materialized in the middle of the garden.

"Daddy!" Goten yelled, unlatching himself from Vegeta's leg (to Vegeta's relief; it was starting to hurt quite a lot) and running over to his father. "Daddy," he said happily, jumping into Goku's arms. Goku accepted the little boy's hug with a slightly stunned look of happiness. Once again, Vegeta was aware of that shadow of sadness (barely perceptible ... but there) beneath the younger Saiyajin's happy facade.

 _I wonder if this has finally shaken the idiot out of his always-look-on-the-bright-side mentality,_ Vegeta thought--and despite the many times that he'd wished Kakarrot could manage to develop at least a small cynical streak, he felt a strange, unaccustomed twinge at the idea now.

"Goku-san!" Chi-Chi said, seeing him. In moments, Goku's family and friends were clustered around him. Vegeta limped to the outskirts of the group, picking thorns out of his legs. Damn that brat. Some of them were driven in so deep that it was going to take some digging to get them out.

"It's really okay, then?" Kuririn asked, holding Marron against his shoulder. "Everything's back?"

Goku nodded. "I had Porunga restore all the damage caused by the robots and the fire, and bring back to life everyone ... well, all the non-evil people who were killed since yesterday afternoon."

"Well, I'm going back to my planet, then," Kaiobito said, and winced: "The planet that used to be mine, I mean. And probably get yelled at when I get there, too." He bowed slightly to Goku and the others. "Goku-san, and all of you--once again, I'm amazed at the way you people can pull victory out of near-certain defeat. We gods owe you a debt, as usual."

"You did a lot this time yourself," Goku said, smiling at him.

"I suppose ... I did, didn't I?" Kaiobito blushed a darker blue, and blushed darker still when Bulma planted a light kiss on his cheek.

"Thanks for saving my guys," she said, winking at him.

Vegeta bristled. "Wait a minute--'guys'?"

Kaiobito realized that retreat was sometimes the best option and, with a little wave, teleported out.

In the silence following the god's departure, Dende cleared his throat. "Um ... I guess I should be getting back to my Lookout, too. Even with everyone having been brought back with the dragonballs, I suppose there's going to be a lot of confusion on Earth as things get sorted out. I should be there to deal with any problems that arise."

"Oh, I almost forgot to give you this." Yamcha handed him the flying carpet.

Dende grinned. "I don't need it now ... I can fly. But Mr. Popo wouldn't be too happy if I left it behind." He waved as he launched himself into the sky. "See you later, guys!"

They waved to him until he was just a small flying speck, swallowed up by the newly risen sun.

"He has the right idea," Piccolo said. "I had best be going, as well."

"Sure you won't stick around?" Gohan asked him.

Piccolo shook his head. "I need some solitude. Meditation." He grinned briefly. "But you know how to find me if you need me."

Gohan smiled back at him. "Thanks for saving me and Videl."

Piccolo nodded, and took off.

"Yeah, we oughta be going too, guys," Kuririn said. "Um ... Bulma, could we borrow a capsule plane? We have a lot of people to get back to Kame House, and not everyone can fly."

"Gee, thanks for remembering me, for a change," Oolong grumbled, and then perked up considerably. "And speaking of me ... I believe we had an arrangement," he leered at Bulma. "Would you like to do it here or go back to --"

A shadow fell across him.

"Do what here?" said Vegeta's dangerously quiet voice.

The pig rotated slowly to look up at the Saiyajin looming over him, arms crossed.

"Um ... I, er, that is ..." Oolong twiddled his fingers, looking away with what he probably thought was an innocent expression.

"I think you were going home," Vegeta said in the same quiet tone. "Weren't you?"

"Yes! Yes, yes I was!" the shapechanger babbled, and fled in Roshi's direction. "We were just going home, right?"

 _Thank you,_ Bulma mouthed at Vegeta, and turned to Kuririn and Eighteen. "Of course you can take a plane. But won't you stay for breakfast first? It's been a long night and I'm sure everyone could use something to eat."

Goku's stomach rumbled, and he grinned sheepishly when Chi-Chi gave him an annoyed glare. "I could eat," he said.

"You can _always_ eat," Chi-Chi muttered, but her frown dissolved into a smile at Goku's wide-eyed innocent look. It was just impossible to stay mad at him.

Kuririn glanced up at Eighteen, who gave him a quick smile, just a twitch of the lips. "Sure, we can stay for breakfast," he said. "It's been awhile since the gang's been in one place."

"Since the last crisis, I suppose," Yamcha said. "Why does it always seem to take a massive threat to the planet to get us back together again?"

Looking around, then up at his wife, Kuririn asked her softly, "Where'd Seventeen go?"

Eighteen smiled slightly. "He left while the rest of you were talking to Goku. He just flew away--it's how he is."

"I was really surprised to see him here."

"So was I," Eighteen admitted.

"Do you think ... do you think he'd like it if we came and visited him sometime?" Kuririn asked.

Eighteen considered it. "You know, until tonight I would have said no. I've left him alone because I thought it was what he wanted. But ... I'm not sure. Perhaps we should try it."

Kuririn nodded, and shifted Marron's soft, heavy weight against his chest. "Sometime soon."

"Um ... excuse me?"

The Z-senshi's attention was drawn to the completely forgotten group of scientists. Ygarddro, their unofficial spokesalien, stood awkwardly (and somewhat damply, from falling in the carp pond) at the head of the group.

"Oh, I'm so sorry! I forgot about you. Poor things--you don't have anyplace to go, do you?" Bulma spread her arms to the group of scientists. "Would you like to stay here at Capsule Corporation with me? We have plenty of room--and you can tell me all about the technology on your homeworlds."

Vegeta rolled his eyes. "Knew it," he murmured.

"We would like that," Ygarddro said quietly. "Thank you ... and thank you all for freeing us. Words cannot express our gratitude."

"I wish we'd been able to do more for you," Goku said. "We can't bring back your destroyed worlds; it's been too long, so our dragonballs can't help."

"You have done enough ... more than enough. We are forever in your debt."

"Does that mean they're going to pay rent?" Vegeta murmured to Bulma. She stomped on his foot.

"Come on, everyone." Bulma looked around at the group. Ragtag and bedraggled, they would have drawn some stares walking down the street--but they were all alive, intact, and she felt a sudden surge of affection for them, for all of them. Well, except maybe Oolong. "Let's not stand around talking on the lawn. Who wants food?"

A chorus of assent greeted her suggestion. Bulma grinned.

Life goes on ...


	19. Epilogue: Why We Play the Game

Time passed, and, as they had done so many times before, the people of Earth went on with their lives, continuing with their love affairs and their feuds, driving to work each day, taking their children to school, as if their world hadn't nearly been destroyed yet again that spring.

"Do you ever think that there must be something in the human psyche that just can't cope with change?" Gohan asked Videl, as the two of them lay on a hillside meadow not far from the Son house, gazing up into an infinite, cloudless blue sky. "Something that puts up blocks in the mind to separate _today_ from _yesterday,_ as if today is the only reality, no matter what happened before. As if the past doesn't exist."

Videl wrenched her gaze away from the sky; she'd been lazily drifting, thinking about flight, and had only heard the last few words. "Hmmm? What doesn't exist?"

"Never mind," Gohan said, smiling as his point was illustrated. His hand groped to find hers, against the cool earth, and he let his head drop back into the grass. There was, after all, no point in dwelling on a painful past.

Overhead, he watched two streaks appear from the west, growing larger until they zoomed across his and Videl's field of vision, leaving golden ki-trails behind them. Small ki-balls flew back and forth between the two of them.

"Who's that?" Videl asked, shading her eyes.

"Reach out your ki and feel them," Gohan reminded her.

Videl did so. "Oh, it's Kuririn and Yamcha!"

"Looks like they're getting quite fast," Gohan said, following the movements of the two fighters with his eyes as they faded into the distance. "Eighteen said they've been practicing regularly since the fight with the spiders. I dunno if it'll last ... it seems like every time there's a threat to the Earth, everybody trains conscientiously for a few months afterward and then lapses back into complacency." He laughed softly. "Well, everybody except Vegeta-san and Dad, but they're Saiyajin; it doesn't count really, I guess."

"I haven't seen your father around much lately," Videl said.

"No." Gohan frowned, staring up into the blue sky. "Neither have we."

 

* * *

 

Months had passed since the defeat of the robots and the rebirth of peace on the Earth's surface. The chill of early spring faded into the flush of summer, and the one-year anniversary of Buu's destruction of the Earth came and went, although no one thought of it except the Z-senshi, since the rest of the planet's population did not remember any of those events.

It took that much time for Eighteen to go and visit her brother, as she'd promised herself she would. Like Kuririn, she had been training in the past few months, although it was a bit different with her than with him; Kuririn was training his body with a specific aim in mind, that of becoming a better fighter, but Eighteen was more intrigued by the idea of exploring her own limits and investigating the things she could really do if she used her natural ki in tandem with her cyborg energy. She thought she finally was beginning to understand what Gero's original idea had been--the reason why he'd used human stock for his latest models rather than building them from scratch. A machine could only perform the functions it was built for, while a human, whose energy came from its own flesh and blood, was limited by its body's ability to build up and maintain a large supply of ki--in order to keep its energy high, a mortal being had to consume a great deal of food (as the Saiyajins apparently did) and also keep its body honed to physical perfection. By combining a human's flexibility with a machine's vast energy supply, Gero had created a fighting machine capable of learning, adapting and overcoming its own limitations.

 _Perhaps this is the true difference between myself and my future counterpart,_ Eighteen mused as she practiced katas in the backyard of Kame House, keeping an eye on Marron playing in the sand nearby. _I never really understood how to use the power that Gero gave me. Seven years ago, I really do not think that my brother and I could have defeated the Z-senshi ... not at the power level that we possessed then. Some of them, maybe, but not all of them. And we were never interested in conquest and destruction, like our counterparts in Trunks's destroyed world._

Maybe part of the difference is that we awoke under different circumstances, and Gero never had a chance to teach us that the limits of our power were higher than we ever dreamed ... perhaps even higher than the Saiyajin themselves. Intoxicated by that promise of power, our future selves became monsters--while we, instead, were reminded of our own limitations when Cell defeated us. They learned arrogance, where we learned humility. And it made all the difference in the world.

Fascinated by the exploration of her own limits, Eighteen continued to put off traveling to see Seventeen. At least, she told herself that was the reason. Finally, she had to admit, if only to herself, that there was a bit of nervousness, too. The last time she'd spent any time around Seventeen was before they were absorbed with Cell. In essence, they were both children then--newly awakened, selfish, surrounded by what they saw as a world full of toys, free for the taking.

A few short days later, Eighteen knew, her own outlook on life had been changed utterly. She was not at all the same person that she had been. All this time, she had believed that Seventeen himself had stayed the same, a boy forever, self-absorbed and unaffected by the events around him. But wasn't it naive to think that he hadn't changed as well?

The question was ... what had he changed into?

She wanted to find out by herself. So not only was she reluctant to visit Seventeen, but she did not want to do it with Kuririn, and she couldn't think of a way to make an excuse to leave.

 _I should just do it. I know he won't mind._

And so, one day, she did. Kuririn was off sparring with Yamcha and Tenshinhan, and Roshi and Oolong had gone into town to stock up on supplies--and, she suspected, on pornography. Only Eighteen and Marron remained on the island. They could be gone and returned before anyone knew where they had been.

"I guess it was inevitable that I should take you," Eighteen sighed as she picked up the little girl. Marron giggled; unlike her daddy, her mother almost never talked to her, and she seemed to enjoy the sound of Eighteen's voice even when she appeared not fully aware of what her mother was saying. "After all ... you are the living proof of my humanity, the evidence that I am different from my brother. Or, so I had always assumed."

She took off from the island with her arms carefully folded around Marron to shield the child from the wind of their travel. In very little time, they were descending into the craggy desert country where Seventeen lived. Eighteen felt her heart pound, almost as if she were an excited human girl. How odd. Living with Kuririn must be affecting her more than she had realized.

Marron squealed with pleasure as they sped down the river canyon where Seventeen lived. Descending towards the rocky outcrop where he had built his house, Eighteen saw her brother standing on the edge, staring up at her.

Eighteen dropped to her feet in front of him. Marron giggled happily and held out her pudgy arms, either recognizing her uncle or simply expressing her usual friendliness toward anyone and everyone. Seventeen stared at her with his normal lack of expression, making no move to reach out to the child.

The silence stretched out and Eighteen realized that she was starting to experience the same discomfort a human might feel in a similar situation. Had she really changed that much? She found herself casting about mentally for conversation topics.

"I felt your approach," Seventeen said at last, rescuing her from having to think of something to say.

"Yes, I was ... out flying," she agreed, setting the squirming Marron down on the ground.

"This is a rather remote place for a flight."

Eighteen raised an eyebrow at him. "Perhaps I also wondered whether you made it home safely after ... everything that happened," she trailed off lamely, realizing that she'd just made perhaps one of the most inane statements of her entire life. What in the world would have happened to him--a freak thunderstorm? A spider? She appeared to be picking up the humans' tendency toward what they called "small talk". How embarrassing.

"Ah," Seventeen said. "I see that you have brought your offspring," he added, glancing at Marron, who was toddling near the edge.

"Yes," Eighteen admitted. "It's quite a problem what to do with it when I'm gone." Perhaps the most annoying aspect of having a child, she'd found; you couldn't simply leave it for a few hours by itself.

"I suppose so," Seventeen said, and turned around and kicked Marron into the river.

Eighteen's jaw dropped and she started to lunge towards the water, but Seventeen stopped her with a hand on her arm. A moment later, Marron surfaced, spluttering and too shocked to cry, treading water rapidly with her small pudgy arms. The current began to sweep her downstream.

Seventeen rose into the air and scooped the child out of the river, depositing her on the ledge where she stood, dripping, still in a state of shock. Eighteen knelt down and put her arms around the stunned, soaking-wet child. "And now why don't you explain why you just did that," she told her brother grimly.

"It was necessary to see if it could swim," Seventeen said.

Eighteen narrowed her eyes at him. "You could have asked ME."

He snorted. "You probably taught it to swim in the ocean shallows. A river is an entirely different matter. And don't say that you can watch the brat every minute, because you can't; your attention has to wander sometime. Before it spends any time on this ledge, it's going to have to be able to fall into the water and pull itself back out again."

Eighteen studied him for a moment, a level blue gaze. "Prudent," she said at last.

"Yes, I am."

Eighteen smiled slowly. Prudent ... with hidden depths yet unguessed. It was going to be fun to get to know her brother again.

 

* * *

 

The warm greenery of summer spread across the planet's northern hemisphere. Capsule Corp., of course, was nearly always warm, and the summer skies in which Vegeta trained himself were not considerably different from how they had been months earlier.

He could have trained in the gravity room, but lately, he'd found it more and more rewarding to be outside. After all, he could crank up the gravity as high as he wanted--500, 600, 700--but it still couldn't quite capture the many variables of being outside. Training inside, no matter how strong you became, was still not a perfect substitute for the full-body sensory alertness of outdoor practice.

Or so he told himself. Perhaps it was only that he liked the blue skies of Earth, that he felt more alive going through his training routine at 1000 feet with a cloudless blue sky above him, a green world below him (so lush, so different from Vegeta-sei) and in between, a windy summer day filled with a million scents carried on the breeze from the distant mountains.

"Vegeta!"

The woman's voice carried on the summer air, and though Vegeta's sharp hearing caught it on the first call, he went on practicing until she'd shouted several more times and her yelling had taken on a ragged note of frustration. Then, grinning, he dropped to the lawn of Capsule Corp., catching himself lightly on bent knees. Straightening as the breeze cooled the sweat of exertion on his body, he smirked at his blue-haired mate and the short human beside her. "You rang?"

"Oh, come off it, Your Highness. I know you heard me the first time," Bulma snapped. "Also, you stink." She threw him a towel.

Vegeta snatched it out of the air. "With your inferior human sense of smell, how can you tell?" he inquired, drying his damp hair.

"Have you seen Son-kun lately?" Bulma asked him.

"No." Vegeta reached out with his ki-sense and located Kakarrot somewhere to the north, near no other sources of ki. "He's in the middle of nowhere. Why?"

Bulma, uncharacteristically, began to fidget, toying with her dress. Kuririn was the one who spoke up. "We're worried about him."

"Worried, huh?" Vegeta tossed the towel over his shoulders. "Why are you bothering me with this?"

"We think he's depressed," Bulma said, looking up at him. "Since you probably know him better than anyone --"

"Since I _what?"_ Vegeta snapped, shocked and vaguely annoyed. "I don't think I've seen Kakarrot more than once or twice since this spring. If you want the Kakarrot status report, ask his brats or his mate."

"We have," Bulma said. "Chi-Chi hasn't seen much of him lately, either. I guess we assumed he was spending time with you ... being the last two Saiyajins alive, and all."

"That counts for a lot less than you'd think," Vegeta snorted. "Is this what you interrupted my training for?"

"Look here, Vegeta--he's depressed!" Kuririn burst out. "I've never actually seen him depressed before--I mean, sad yeah, upset yeah, but not ... not like this. Losing his family the second time ... it did it to him. The few times I've talked to him since then, he acts all happy and cheerful like usual, but you can sense this kind of ... underlying darkness, I guess. And he always finds some excuse to leave almost immediately."

"And this has what to do with me?" Vegeta demanded, tossing the damp towel back to Bulma and ignoring Kuririn's glare.

She caught it with a look of distaste. "We've just been thinking, dear. Son-kun is impossible to talk to at any time, regardless of his state of mind. 'Heart-to-heart' is a foreign concept with him. You might as well try to psychoanalyze a rock. Whether he's depressed, happy, upset, or whatever, it's impossible to get him to articulate his feelings."

"The only thing that seems to help him when he's down is fighting," Kuririn picked up where she left off, at an insistent glare from Bulma. "But he's so far above my level now that it wouldn't be very cathartic for him. He'd have to hold back too much to avoid hurting me."

Vegeta looked back and forth between his mate and her friend. "So basically ..." he said at last. "What you're saying is that you want me ... to beat the living crap out of Kakarrot?"

"That's pretty much it," Kuririn admitted.

An old, familiar expression crawled slowly onto Vegeta's face--an expression that had, on worlds throughout the galaxy, caused strong fighting men to run screaming in terror and planetary rulers to wet themselves. It was a grin of pure, sadistic Saiyajin glee.

"It would be my pleasure," he said simply, and shot skyward in a blaze of ki, vanishing into the cloudless noonday sky.

Kuririn and Bulma stared after him, then, after a moment, looked at each other. At last, Kuririn said, "Do you think we should have done that?"

 

* * *

 

Far to the north, Goku stood on a mountaintop, brooding as well as he knew how to brood, which wasn't very well.

It took a lot to batter down Goku's irrepressible cheerfulness, but the events of the past year had come closer than anything in his life to doing so.

Goku had seen, and dealt, a lot of death in his lifetime. He loved fighting, but he did not like to kill, or to watch things die. Still, he'd weathered that--even his best friend's death, even the death of his grandfather and the discovery that he had been responsible for it.

But ... at the center of his soul, there was always a sense of grounding. The Earth was still there, would always be there. It had been threatened, it had been endangered, it had suffered the destruction of entire cities--but it had always been there. And his family had always been there: Chi-Chi, Gohan, Goten. In honesty, Son Goku didn't think of his family all that often--not because he didn't care, but because it wasn't really in him to dwell on other people's well-being. He thought of them as safe, and so they were; and he went on with his life, content the whole time in the conviction that they would always be safe, no matter the danger.

Then, in a matter of months, he lost them all, not once but twice. He felt them die, not once but twice. He watched the planet that he loved blown to pieces while he was powerless to prevent its destruction, and then, only a year later, was on the verge of watching the whole thing happen again--and once again, he was powerless, even more so than the first time.

Somebody who wasn't Son Goku might have been broken by this. Goku didn't break, and slowly, his naturally bubbly personality began to overwhelm the unaccustomed depression. But slowly, very slowly.

Goku was perhaps the only person in the world who really didn't know how to be depressed. He'd never experienced it; this was all new to him. He wasn't even articulate enough in his inner dialogue to understand why he wasn't happy. He only knew that a sense of sadness haunted him, a feeling of unhappiness that he couldn't shake, and being unhappy was something he did not understand, could not fight.

A ball of ki hit him square in the back and knocked him flat on his face, leaving small wisps of smoke curling up from his gi.

The ki-ball wasn't very powerful, certainly not enough to hurt an adult Saiyajin, and if he'd noticed it coming, he would have batted it away effortlessly. As it was, though, he was taken completely by surprise--partly because of his preoccupation with his own dark thoughts, and partly because the attacker's ki had been lowered to nearly undetectable levels while it snuck up on him. Now it had been allowed to rebound and he recognized it.

Goku pushed himself up on his elbows, spitting out dirt. He glanced over his shoulder to see Vegeta floating above him, smirking as usual.

"Tag," Vegeta said.

He shot off into the distance without awaiting a reply. A moment later, a rapidly gaining ki and a barrage of low-powered energy balls let him know that his challenge had not gone unanswered.

When Vegeta had first heard of this Earth children's game, years ago, his initial reaction had been the same as his reaction to most Earth customs--a sneer of disdain. Why did these fools bother making their children play at mock war, when it would be such better training to give them real weapons and turn them loose to go at each other? In this darting free-flight, however, Vegeta discovered that the game was actually more challenging than it seemed, especially with the restriction of not being able to respond to the attacker in kind. His quick mind worked through the strategic ramifications of this game and came to the conclusion that there was no possible outcome for the prey other than being worn down and eventually "tagged". He speculated that it might be helpful to add a few Vegeta variations to the rules and started powering up a Big Bang Attack, when he noticed something familiar about the landscape passing rapidly beneath him.

Yes, he knew this place--this was the spot where he'd fought Kakarrot when he first came to Earth. The arid landscape held the marks of the battle well, with no vegetation to cover the scars or water to erode away the shattered hillsides. Vegeta, whose mind was trained to catalogue and retain every detail of a battle, could even remember which attacks had left some of those blackened cliffsides and crumbled hilltops.

Vegeta grinned as he dodged another ki-ball and glanced over his shoulder, going through a series of aerial evasive maneuvers and watching Goku try to anticipate his moves (and pretty damn well, but that was what he'd come to expect). The big half-wit seemed to be having fun. Vegeta had suspected that this pointless Earth-game would appeal to Goku's frivolous mind.

He was well acquainted with the fact that life does not often work out as you plan it--but still, he could almost laugh at the unlikeness of it all. Here he was, ten years after the battle that had taken place beneath them ... playing an Earth children's game with the enemy who had tried so hard to kill him.

Where would he have expected to be by now? Dead or ruling the universe, he mused, executing a rapid series of rolls to avoid a low-powered Goku version of Kuririn's Kienzan attack. Yes ... he doubted that he would have been able to endure being a servant to that pale bastard Freeza for much longer than he had. The day would have come that he would have broken ways with Freeza--either by challenging the dictator directly, or by fleeing to another part of the galaxy and gathering an army of his own. Either way, it would have come to a head long since. He wondered idly how it would have worked out. Odds were good that he'd be in Hell now--but who could know; he'd turned out to have the capacity within himself for a level of power that could easily have killed Freeza, and if something had happened to bring it out, then maybe he, Vegeta, would have won.

And won _what_ ... ah, there was the big question. Freeza's petty dictatorship, he supposed--a position as a destroyer of worlds, constantly challenged (as Freeza had been) by power-hungry wannabes and by revenge-obsessed warriors whose worlds had died at his hands.

Instead, he had ended up with a different prize ... something even more unexpected than playing tag with a former enemy in the summer skies of Earth ...

Inner peace.

Inner peace--what a concept. He'd never dreamed of such a thing ... never thought there could be a kind of contentment that came from another source than the mind-emptying fire of battle-rage. He had not sought it, nor wanted it, nor understood it--but now he had it, thanks to a woman who saw good in him when he saw none in himself ... thanks to a child who loved him unconditionally despite his sins of the past ... and thanks to a good-hearted, lower-class halfwit who was willing to give him second chances even though he --

A ki-ball hit him square in the face, singeing his eyebrows. While he'd been lost in thought, his opponent had circled around the front.

"Tag!" Goku shouted, and shot a good 200 feet straight up, laughing.

... even though he ...

... even after all the things he'd done ...

... and he wouldn't trade those three for anything: not for strength, not for galactic domination, not even to have been the one to kill Freeza, though that still rankled.

He would, however, give quite a lot to scorch the grin off the face of the idiot hovering above him, backlit by the summer sun.

Vegeta hurled a bombardment of low-energy ki attacks, which Goku cheerfully dodged. Irked, Vegeta threw a much bigger, faster ball of ki, which Goku also eluded but not by such a wide margin. It blew the top off a mountain behind him.

"Hey, Vegeta, tag isn't supposed to be that kind of contact sport," Goku protested, ducking another massive ki-ball which sailed harmlessly into outer space and exploded.

"This is Vegeta Tag," Vegeta retorted, building energy between his gloved palms.

"Well, if that's how you want it," and with that, Goku powered up to Super Saiyajin. Vegeta followed suit.

"What does the winner get?" Goku asked as they circled ever higher in a dizzying spiral, both throwing energy while the other avoided it.

"The chance to grind the loser's face into a cliffside under his boot, Kakarrot," Vegeta growled.

"Oh, I can do that to you anytime," Goku said happily, grinning as the peeved prince redoubled the force of his attacks. After a moment, the younger Saiyajin said, "I say that if I win, you have to call me Goku for a week."

"In your dreams, Kakarrot."

"What ... isn't there anything that you want?" Goku asked, wide-eyed and innocent, slipping lithely between two energy balls when at least one of them should have hit him head-on.

Vegeta's smirk returned. "Well ... if you insist, Kakarrot. Should I win, you and your mate will be babysitting Trunks for a week."

"I think you've got the better deal," Goku complained, parrying another of Vegeta's ki-balls with one of his own.

"Touch luck, Kakarrot; you made the rules." And quite aside from that, Kakarrot was clearly having fun, his depression temporarily forgotten, which was the whole point anyhow.

Goku's only response was to laugh and bring his hands to his side. "Ka ... me ..."

"Big ..."

"... ha ... me ..."

" ... Bang ..."

" ... HAAAAA!"

"... ATTACK!"

In some fights, as in life, it really doesn't matter who wins. It's why you play the game.


End file.
